Uncharted Territories
by tobinfic
Summary: Christine Chapel joins Starfleet when her world has been turned upside down and she doesn't know what she wants anymore. Quickly noticed by the shady Section 31, Christine struggles to find her place at the Academy and train for a career in espionage. Activation by Section 31 crushes her tentative romance with Leonard McCoy, but it also plunges Christine into a dangerous mission to


**Unexplored Territories**

Chapter One

Christine Chapel did not want to join Starfleet when she was a little girl, playing with the very cool junior microscope set that she'd been given for her seventh birthday. She didn't want to join Starfleet in high school, where she had breezed through the AP science classes a year early and was bussed to the local college to take more advanced classes there. She didn't want to join Starfleet when she received both her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in bio-research, specialising in endocrinology. She certainly didn't want to join Starfleet when she started working with the noted medical archaeologist Roger Korby as part of his research team, or later, when their relationship deepened and became more intimate, leading to their engagement.

The day that she discovered that he had used her analysis of his data in a paper and not credited her, it annoyed her. The day she found out that he planned to take her junior assistant, Andrea, to his new dig on Exo III rather than her, she was angry. The day she realised that both Roger and Andrea had been using both her and her research to further their own careers, lied to her about their own illicit relationship and removed her from the archaeological research team she was downright _livid_.

That still didn't want to make her join Starfleet, though.

After packing her stuff from the apartment that she and Roger had decorated together, taking her share of the credits in their joint bank account and deliberately mislabelling all of the samples in the laboratory that she and Andrea shared, she went back home to lick her wounds in private. Her parents wisely decided to say nothing about the situation and offered her the spare room. Her grandmother, on the other hand, was slightly more vocal.

"You can't spend all day staring into the fridge, you know," she said one morning, as Christine was making the difficult decision between orange and grapefruit juice.

"I'm not," Christine said mildly, reaching out to take the orange juice, and then pausing.

"You've been here two weeks and you've done nothing but moon about the place like a lovesick schoolgirl," her grandmother snorted. "It's time to move on."

Christine's temper flared.

"He was my fiancé," she said through gritted teeth. "I think I'm allowed some grieving time."

"He was an ass," her grandmother said bluntly. "And thank God you found out before you were actually stupid enough to marry him. You shouldn't be grieving, you should be celebrating."

Christine opened her mouth to argue, but the words wouldn't come.

"He was an ass," she agreed eventually.

"I never liked him," her grandmother said.

"You made that abundantly clear every time we came here," Christine said, sighing.

"Really?" her grandmother grinned. "What gave it away?"

"Well, the fact that you used to call him Richard when you knew damn well his name was Roger was a bit of a hint," Christine replied, smiling even though she was trying her hardest to be firm with her incorrigible grandmother.

"I've called him a lot worse than that," her grandmother said darkly.

"Well, me too," Christine sighed, and stared back into the fridge again.

She yelped in pain as her grandmother dealt her a sharp smack to the backside.

"So what the hell are you doing drifting around here as if your true love had drowned at sea? Get out there! Go meet people! Go meet _men_," her grandmother leered.

"I don't want a man, Granny," Christine said, rubbing her backside and frowning.

Her grandmother shrugged her shoulders unrepentantly. "Go and find a woman then, I don't care, but for the love of all that's holy, you shouldn't be mourning that unrepentant moron. What are you doing about your work?" she asked, spinning the conversation on its edge in her characteristic way. "You're not going to let that go too, are you, as well as your figure?"

"There's nothing wrong with my figure!" Christine said hotly.

"There will be if you keep grazing around the kitchen like you've been doing for the past two weeks," said her grandmother with the assurance of a woman who knows she's overweight and is too old to give a damn about it.

"I've had some offers," Christine said, finally deciding on the orange juice and moving to fetch a glass from the cabinet. "There's a place opening up in the new semester in the bio research department at one of the Cambridge colleges. Or Dr Marcia Klein's been in touch, offering me head of her research lab at the Mars facility."

"She's Roger's main competitor, isn't she?" her grandmother asked as she delved into the refrigerator, bypassed the low fat yogurts and emerged with a giant slice of chocolate cake.

"Well, they're both experts in the field, so it's not like they're actively competing against each other…" Christine began, before her grandmother interrupted around her slice of cake.

"Except for grant money, publication in journals, exposure on educational documentaries and general fame and glory?"

Christine couldn't help herself, and smiled.

"Well, yes. Except for all of that. Marcia and Roger are really competitive, and I can't help but feel that she only wants me because I used to work for Roger. Like employing me will give her some kind of edge."

"Well, of course it would," her grandmother said loyally. "You're brilliant."

Christine rolled her eyes and sipped her juice.

"Thanks Gran," she said, humour tingeing her voice with a lightness that hadn't been present for the last few weeks. "But I'm not interested in being a weapon against Roger. I really don't want anything to do with him any more, and if I worked with Marcia, then I'd see him all the time."

"Is that the only thing stopping you from taking the job?" her grandmother asked eyebrow raised. "Because you shouldn't let that cretin stop you…"

"No Gran," Christine said, cutting her off. "It's not just that. I think I'm ready for a change. The work I did for Roger was interesting, but not challenging. I think I'm ready for something different."

"And the Cambridge job?"

"More of the same, from what I can gather," Christine said, eying the disappearing chocolate cake.

"Has there been anything else?" her grandmother asked, noting Christine's interest in the cake and moving it closer to her body, protecting it with an arm.

"Well," Christine hedged. "I was talking to my friend Carol last night. I don't know if you remember her."

"Pretty girl," her grandmother said, sucking on her fork thoughtfully. "British. Didn't she have a father who was some big hoo-hah in Starfleet?"

"Very pretty," Christine agreed. "We met when I was doing my first degree, and we ended up sharing a house off-campus. She enlisted after we graduated, and I went off to get my next degree."

"So what did she say, your pretty British friend?"

"Well," Christine said, "she asked me whether I had considered what Starfleet could offer me."

"Have you?"

"Not seriously," Christine admitted. "It's not something I've ever really thought about before."

"And now?"

Her grandmother had a piercing stare that had been honed through many years of teaching and parenting. It now had the power to force the unwilling recipient to tell the truth even when they had no intention of speaking at all. It was like a tractor beam that dragged information from you.

"I did spend some time looking at their science division," Christine admitted. "Some of their research programmes are interesting…"

Her grandmother made a rude raspberry sound.

"You're lying," she said.

"I'm not!" Christine insisted.

"You don't go and join an organisation that takes people into space just to sit in a lab somewhere," her grandmother scoffed. "Try that again, only tell the truth this time."

"Well," Christine sighed, "I did spend some time looking at the medical division."

"Aren't you a doctor already?" her grandmother asked.

"Not a medical doctor, no," Christine said. "Although some of the knowledge does overlap."

"Is that what you want to do? Be a medical doctor? In space?"

"I don't know," Christine admitted. "Honestly Gran, I really don't. All I do know is that I need to do something different to what I've done before."

Her grandmother pushed the remains of the chocolate cake around her plate thoughtfully.

"I think you should look into it," she said decisively. "Don't commit yourself to anything yet, but look around. Is it the space part that you want, or the doctor part? Could you have one without the other?"

"I was considering medicine at one point," Christine said. "I took the research route instead, but I've always wondered if I'd be any good at it."

"You should go to one of their recruiting stations and ask a few questions," her grandmother advised. "See if you can imagine yourself doing that job."

Christine did as she was told, which was always the easiest way to deal with her grandmother. She logged back on to the Starfleet information site, and did a lot of careful reading. She found the nearest recruitment office and talked over her options with a cheerful lieutenant. She talked to Carol again, who squealed down the vid line to her from three systems away and who encouraged Christine to join up.

"It's hard work," she admitted, "but Christine, I spend every day being challenged, knowing that I'm doing great things. Important things."

"I'm not that keen on the uniform," Christine replied dubiously.

"Meh," Carol replied, shrugging her shoulders. "It saves you the problem of wondering what you're going to wear every day. And let's face it, we both wear blue well."

"Thank God we don't want to be engineers," Christine said dryly. "Red is just so draining."

They laughed, and Christine felt better than she had in a long time.

"I'll think about it," she promised her friend. "I'll let you know. It depends if I pass the first online test."

"Oh come on," Carol sighed. "That test's just there to weed out people that can't spell their own names."

"Now that's a comfort," Christine replied tartly.

"It should be, rumour has it that's where they source the security teams from," Carol said dryly.

Laughing, Christine hung up on her friend. The next day, she completed the first online test that all applicants had to pass in order to be invited to the Academy in San Francisco to sit a battery of other examinations. Two days after that, she was booking her flight to San Francisco.

Chapter Two

The first thing she learned about life in the fleet was that she hated campus housing. There had been a reason that she had always tried to live off-campus at her previous universities, and that reason was being forced to live with a roommate. Christine was quite a private person, and the thought of being forced to live in small, magnolia-painted quarters with a complete stranger ten years her junior was enough to make her shudder.

At the age of 30, Christine was one of the oldest people in her intake group. Most people joined Starfleet after their first degree, if they were on the officer track, younger if they were training to join the fleet's administrative and non-command staff. Cadets of her age were fairly rare. In fact, as she sat through the third and, thankfully, last of a series of tedious orientation lectures, she could only spot one other human that looked as if he was in her age group. He had arrived slightly late and had spots of red high on his cheekbones as he nodded curtly to the Petty Officer who was leading the session. He was towing behind him a younger man who would have been handsome if he hadn't been sporting so many bruises.

The older man was slightly taller than his friend, scowling and dark haired in comparison to the cheerful blond who acknowledged every pretty cadet he saw with a wink and a friendly leer. His shoulders were broad and he tapered nicely to a backside that Christine idly thought about biting through the unflattering cadet reds that they all wore with various degrees of enthusiasm.

That thought made her sit up, startled.

She was not the sort of person that thought about biting the backsides of strange men. She was engage….

No, she thought bitterly. No, she wasn't. She hadn't formally broken the engagement with Roger, but she thought that was implicit in the way she had thrown her ring at him with such force and precision that he was forced to wear a protective eye patch for several days afterwards. She was not an engaged woman. She wasn't a woman with a boyfriend. She wasn't even a woman who had a discreet arrangement with a like-minded friend, more's the pity.

So, she reasoned, if she wanted to, she could think about biting the backside of whomsoever she pleased.

She'd never been what she'd consider promiscuous, but Christine had never lacked for boyfriends. Not all were serious relationships, although some had been headed that way before something derailed them. She had resigned herself to never thinking of another man sexually other than Roger which, she realised with a snort, should have been a very large warning sign. Roger was intellectually brilliant and a leader in his field, but he had not inspired much admiration once his clothes were removed. It hadn't mattered, not when she loved him and she thought he loved her. You were supposed to look past those things, weren't you?

Now he had revealed himself to be a cheating bastard that deserved to catch every strain of drug-resistant STI currently at large, Christine no longer had to think charitable of his hairy toes and pot belly.

She bet that the tall grumpy man didn't have a pot belly. Or hairy toes, either, although that wasn't really a deal breaker. She bet that his biceps were bigger than Roger's had been, and although there as no reputable study published that said that height and foot size correlated with penis size, Christine was willing to make a very unscientific bet that Mr Tall, Dark and Handsome was also Mr Tripod.

Hmm. Now that was a thought worth considering. Now that she was (relatively) young, free and single perhaps it was worth trying to conduct a little private research of her own. Specifically, into the pants of the grumpy latecomer. The last thing she wanted was another relationship, but some fun and friendly no-strings-attached…_research_ was just the thing to cleanse her palate after Roger.

Movement from the cadets around her snapped her out of her reverie, and she began filing down the aisle of the tiered lecture theatre towards the first of that day's testing rooms with the rest of the class. By hanging back a little here and being willing to elbow past people there, she was able to get into position just behind her target as they shuffled slowly down the stairs.

"…if you hadn't been so damn late in the shower, we would have been here on _time,_ jackass," she heard him grumble.

"It takes time to look this good," his friend joked, turning back to address his friend. "And talking of looking good," he continued, catching sight of Christine Chapel, "Hey gorgeous. I'm Jim Kirk."

The dark haired man turned back to look over his shoulder too, and Christine had to rethink her earlier appraisal. Dark, yes, but with hazel eyes, neither brown nor green. His eyelashes were impossibly thick and lustrous and his lips were deliciously plump.

"You're about to fall down the stairs," Christine said blithely to Kirk, who smiled uncomprehendingly before his missed his footing and stumbled into the backs of two cadets in front of him.

The dark haired man smiled for the first time since he entered the room, and it just made him even more attractive.

"Gravity is a great equaliser," he said over his shoulder to Christine, careful to keep his own footing.

"Christine Chapel," she said, smiling at him.

This seemed to throw him for a moment; he looked back suspiciously at her for a second, then controlled himself enough to say "Leonard McCoy" in a gruff voice.

"See you around, McCoy," she said simply, and manoeuvred past him, leaving him floundering a little on the staircase.

There. That had been an altogether satisfactory first meeting. She'd shown interest in him, not his friend, but hadn't appeared gushing or predatory. She'd thrown him a little off balance (although not as much as Kirk) and that now meant that he'd be thinking of her. She nodded, pleased with herself, before turning her attention to finding the right computer station in the large hall all the cadets had been herded into.

The testing procedure lasted for a full week. From nine in the morning to six in the evening, the cadets were put though a rigorous series of tests that covered everything from their academic knowledge of their specialist fields, tests of both logical and lateral thinking and many, many psychological evaluations. Some of the questions on the tests made Christine pause; they asked her whether she could cope with the fact that she could die while doing her job, and she could have cause to order others to their deaths in order to complete a mission. They made her think quite carefully, but, she reasoned, everybody died sooner or later. Whether you did it at home in bed surrounded by plump grandchildren or you went out in a blaze of glory as your starship exploded, it had to happen. She answered as honestly as she could to all questions, and only hesitated over the one that asked her if she could order somebody to their death. She hoped it would never come to that, and as a medical officer she would probably never have to issue that order. But she would probably have to triage after a serious incident at some point in her service, and that would mean prioritising who would get treatment and who were too badly injured to try and save.

Could she do that? Could she be that dispassionate?

Probably, she realised, slightly shocked at herself. She had always been known for her cool and calm demeanour, and as a scientist she always tried to make her decisions based on logical reasoning rather than her emotions. When faced with that sort of decision…yes, she could probably do it, if the situation were serious enough.

Of course, not all the tests were mental ones. Serving in Starfleet demanded a high level of physical fitness, and all cadets were put through a punishing regime of physical tests that left Christine feeling like a limp noodle at the end of them.

It was after one such test that she saw McCoy and his friend Kirk again. Her group had just finished a run through the notorious assault course, and she was leaning against a fence greedily gulping down a bottle of water. She had rope burn on her hands from slipping down the climbing section and some nasty bruising forming on her thighs where she had lost her footing and fallen after she dropped down from a high wall. Mud was splattered all over her legs and arms and, quite frankly, she felt sweaty and disgusting. So of course, that was when she saw Kirk, McCoy and their group come charging over the line in the last sprint section of the course and make a bee line for the table set up with water bottles. She hadn't gone far after collecting hers, so she was directly in their eyeline as they collected their drinks.

"Hey hot stuff. Enjoy getting dirty?"

Ah, Jim Kirk, a name she was reminded of because McCoy growled it at him in warning as they ambled over to her spot.

"McCoy, Kirk," she said, nodding to them and ignoring Jim's friendly grin. "You made it through?"

"Just," McCoy said, rubbing his elbow and wincing. "I swear to God, that thing is a damned death trap."

"Tell me about it," she commiserated. She displayed her palms. "Rope burn. And my thighs are going to be bruised for days."

Kirk's eyes went predictably towards her thighs, on display in her physical activity kit. McCoy's eyes flickered there, but he stepped forward and took her hands in his. Large hands, she noted, remembering her theory, and tried not to laugh.

"It doesn't look too serious, but you should get these abrasions sanitised and sealed before you pick up an infection," he said, his eyes peering professionally at her reddened palms. "Jim, make yourself useful and find me a first aid kit."

Jim wandered off towards a large group of female cadets.

"Are you qualified to be treating me?" Christine teased. "Or is this an excuse to hold my hands?"

"I'm more than qualified, darlin'," he said, giving her a smirk that made her stomach flip-flop. "I'm a doctor."

"So am I," Christine said, eyebrow raised. "Of biomedical science. About a fifth of the people here probably have some kind of doctorate. But are you a medical doctor, or a doctor of physics or something like that?"

"I'm a surgeon," he told her, still holding her hands. "So I can do this," he said, stroking his fingers lightly over the rope burn, "and know what I'm doing."

"That hurts!" Christine protested.

"Baby," McCoy said scornfully, just as Kirk jogged back up with a field med kit in his hands.

"Found one!" he announced cheerfully. "Here you go, Bones."

"Bones?" Christine asked.

"It's all he has left, apparently," Kirk told her as McCoy opened the kit, examined it and shook his head as he rummaged through it. "His bones. Although he does also come with a huge chip on his shoulder about women."

"Really?" Christine asked, amused at Kirk's not-so-subtle poking of the bear.

"Bad divorce," Kirk said, shaking his head in mock-sorrow. "He's damaged goods. You need somebody younger, less bitter."

"Somebody like you?" Christine said, wincing as McCoy wiped an antiseptic swab over her damaged palms.

"Well, if you're offering…" Jim began, before Christine's laughing cut him off.

"I'm not," she told him firmly. "Sorry kid, not interested."

"You can't be that much older than me," Jim said, looking her up and down with an assessing look.

"Jim," McCoy warned, but Christine waved his concern away.

"I'm old enough to know better," she told him.

"Suit yourself," Jim shrugged, completely unconcerned by this knock-back.

"Oh, I'm planning to," she assured him. She caught McCoy's eye for a second as he ran a mini dermal regenerator over her hands. Something flickered in his hazel eyes for a second – interest, possibly? – before he dropped his eyes again to her hands.

"So what's your story?" Jim asked.

"My story?" Christine said, flexing her hands and smiling at McCoy, who turned away and repacked the med kit.

"He's here because of a bad divorce, I'm here because I'm going to be the first person to graduate in three years – why are you here, Chapel?"

"I'm here because it's time for a change in my life," Christine said carefully.

"And the rest," Jim said knowingly.

Christine sighed.

"I walked out on my fiancé, Roger, when I found out that he was screwing my assistant and screwing me out of credit on our research. It was either find a job that was the same as before, or starting over and doing something new. So here I am."

"Ouch," said Jim, appreciatively.

"That's what he said," Christine said grimly.

Jim grinned. McCoy was facing away from her, but Christine saw his shoulders move slightly.

"I like you," Jim announced. "You should come out with us tonight."

"I'm not sure," Christine began, but then stopped herself. Why shouldn't she go out? A few drinks wouldn't hurt, and God knew she could do with letting a bit of the week's tension go. And, perhaps, McCoy might be up for a bit of tension releasing too.

"Oh hell, why not?" she said. "Where are you going?"

"We're starting at The Key, and then moving on from there," Jim said vaguely. "We go where the night takes us."

"It'll take us back to the dorm by eleven," McCoy said firmly. "There's still two days left of testing and I don't want to screw it up by getting smashed with you, Jim."

"Says the man who turned up to the shuttle to the Academy half drunk," Jim said cheerily, slapping him on the shoulder.

McCoy's face darkened and his eyes showed the anger he was obviously feeling.

"You know damn well I hate those tin death traps," he said through gritted teeth.

"So, The Key," Christine said brightly. "When?"

"Gaila!" Jim shouted over to a group of cadets milling around by the water table. "What time at The Key?"

"Seven!" shouted back a beautiful Orion girl, with red corkscrew curls.

"Seven," he repeated to Christine. "Gaila's in your dorm, right? I'll get her to swing by and pick you up."

He gave her a friendly grin and went to drape himself over the Orion girl, who obviously didn't seem to mind at all.

As the last group of cadets staggered over the finish line, the instructors started to bellow instructions to the group.

"I'll see you later then, McCoy," Christine said, throwing her bottle into the nearest recycling unit.

"Yeah," he said gruffly. "If I go. I'm not exactly as young as the rest of these guys. I can't just shake off a heavy night the way I used to."

"That's right, you're positively ancient," snorted Christine. "You could drink those kids under the table and you know it."

That got a bark of surprised laughter from him.

"Thanks for fixing my hands," she told him. "Maybe later you could see what you can do with my thighs."

He blinked in surprise and she smiled sweetly before turning away and walking nonchalantly back to the shuttle that would take the exhausted cadets back to their dorms.

There. Just enough sexual innuendo to get him interested without appearing too predatory. Christine was pleased; it had been a while since she'd actively flirted with anybody, and she thought that had gone rather well.

Chapter Three

The club was exactly how Christine remembered them from her younger days – hot, dark and incredibly noisy. The music was loud enough to make the walls shake, or so it seemed to her. The rest of the women who had arrived at her dorm room to pick her up, all younger and glossier, somehow, than Christine saw herself, plunged gleefully onto the crowded dance floor. Christine headed for the bar.

"Screwdriver," she told the barman. "Strong."

She watched carefully as he obligingly doubled the amount of vodka that the drink usually called for, and sighed with satisfaction at the first sip. It would have been better without the orange juice, but McCoy had been right about there being two more days of testing. No point screwing things up before she started.

She leaned against the bar as she sipped her drink, noting faces that had become familiar over the last few days. Gaila waved at her encouragingly from a knot of eager young men on the dance floor, but Christine shook her head and nodded towards the drink in her hand. She liked Gaila. She'd only known her for the length of the walk from the Academy to the club, but she seemed cheerful and happy and had pulled Christine into an easy conversation as they walked. They had been joined by Gaila's roommate, a woman called Uhura, and four or five others from their corridor. All of the other women were dancing to the pounding beat of the music, and she was amused to see Jim Kirk shimmy his way into their group. They largely encouraged him except Uhura, who poked a finger into his chest and forced him to back off a few metres.

"I'll say that for him; the boy won't take defeat easily."

She looked to her side to see McCoy, oddly stiff in a plain t-shirt and an old pair of jeans.

"She's not interested?" she asked, moving closer to him and raising her voice so she could be heard over the sound of the thumping beat.

"Not at all, which just makes him want to try harder. I don't think many girls turn him down," McCoy noted, leaning closer so he could speak into her ear.

"I did," Christine pointed out.

"You're a woman, not a girl," McCoy said, then blushed a little and turned to the bar man to order his bourbon.

"Make it a double," Christine told the bar man, "and another one of these. On me," she said to a protesting McCoy. "Thank you for looking after my hands today."

"It was nothing," McCoy said. "How are your thighs?"

Christine stared at him as he blushed even more, cursed and put his face in his hands.

"I mean that in a non-sexual manner, obviously," he said, eventually making eye contact again. "God, I'm bad at this."

"Well, that's just a shame," Christine said, grinning. "Because my thighs are just fine."

He stared at her a moment, confusion on his face. He drained his drink and set it down on the bar.

"Are you flirting with me?" he demanded.

"I must be really out of practice if you can't tell," Christine said.

"I'm not…I can't have…I'm not ready…" he began, and Christine held up her hands in the universal gesture for 'slow down'.

"Again," she said to the barman, who had returned to their end of the bar and began to replenish their drinks.

"Drink this," she instructed McCoy, who took his drink and did as he was told.

"I'm not looking for anything serious, McCoy," she said with a smile. "For God's sake, I broke up with the man I thought I was going to grow old and die with just three weeks ago. All I want is a little fun."

"Fun?" McCoy asked, eyebrow raised.

Christine sighed.

"He left me for somebody younger," she said, knocking back a hefty swig of her own drink. "Somebody who has a trimmer waist than me and bigger tits than mine."

She checked; McCoy's eyes remained virtuously on her face. She was impressed.

"I want to see if I've still got it," she explained.

"It?" he asked, the beginning of a smirk just playing on his lips.

"It," she replied forcefully. "Don't act like you don't know what I mean."

"And you picked me?" he said, playing with his glass, spinning it slightly on the bar and then stilling it. His eyes went from her to the glass and back again.

"If you're willing," she shrugged. "I don't want to flog a dead horse McCoy, if you're not interested then I'm sure I'll find somebody…"

"Wait," he said hurriedly, putting out a hand to stop her from leaving, letting it rest on the soft shine of her sequinned top. "I didn't say that I'm not interested."

"You're not saying much at all," Christine pointed out.

McCoy sighed, and motioned to the waiting bar man who was hovering in their area with the patience of the experienced alcohol provider. Drinks quickly appeared in their hands, with McCoy handing over the credits.

"Come on," he said, and headed to the back of the club where there were booths set up for those who didn't feel like dancing. The music here was marginally quieter. He waited until she slid into a booth right at the back of the room, then sat across from her. He put his drink down on the table, picked it up, looked at it, and set it back down again. Christine sipped her own drink, and waited.

"I met Pam when I was a kid," he said abruptly, not quite making eye contact. "We were on and off again through our teens and we both had other relationships at college, but…it was like there was a rope stretched between us. We'd get so far apart, and then snap, we'd get pulled back together."

He picked up his drink, and took a healthy swallow.

"And now that rope's broken," Christine said with no small amount of sympathy.

"Yeah," he said, his voice rough with the bourbon and the emotion.

"Sucks," she said succinctly.

"Yeah," he agreed, with a very faint hint of humour.

"Want to have sex?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, making eye contact with her for the first time since they sat down.

"I'm clean," she told him. "And I'm on birth control, so you don't have to worry. I want to make this clear though, I'm not looking for a relationship. I don't want a boyfriend. I just want some fun with somebody who thinks the same way I do."

"Well," he said, raising an eyebrow. "You don't beat about the bush, do you?"

She shrugged. "As somebody very wise once said, a vague disclaimer is nobody's friend. We've both been jerked around. I thought you'd appreciate a direct approach."

He smiled, and raised his glass to his lips. "Well, you got me pegged," he told her. "I do like to cut to the chase."

"That's the beauty of this arrangement, McCoy," Christine said, finishing her drink. "No chasing necessary. It's a done deal."

He winced slightly.

"What?" Christine demanded.

"A done deal…it seems a bit…" he hedged, clearly uncomfortable.

"Unromantic?" Christine offered dryly. At his nod, she laughed. "Shit, McCoy, what good has romance done for you recently?"

"Well," he said, after a moment's thought. "Not a god damned thing."

"I can buy my own candy and flowers," she told him. "And I get myself off too, if I have to, although I've found that it's usually more fun if somebody else is involved."

"So no romance required," McCoy said, staring at her intently. "Anything else I need to know?"

"I don't care who else you fuck, but I want to be protected," she said in a matter of fact tone. "I assume that you're not stupid with your sexual health."

"I've done my share of lecturing dumb teenagers on STIs," he told her. "I'm not a dumb teenager."

"I'm not averse to experimentation," Christine said, praying that her pale skin wasn't showing the blush that she knew was forming. "But nothing stupid or dangerous."

She wasn't averse to experimenting, but it had been a long time since she had done anything that couldn't be classed as….routine. Roger hadn't been especially adventurous and she hadn't felt it was necessary to push any boundaries. Perhaps, in hindsight, that had been a sign of the rot in their relationship setting in. Anyway. Water. Bridges.

"Good to know," he said. "I don't think anything I do in bed could be classified as dangerous."

She smiled. "Shall we go and find out?" she asked, standing and extending her hand.

"Sure," he replied, after only a moment's hesitation. He stood up, and laced his fingers through hers. She was just buzzed enough to feel excited about pulling off the blatant proposition of the most handsome man she'd seen in a long time, and not nervous at the thought of getting naked with a man she'd known for a space of days.

They left the club, snaking around the side of the crowded dance floor. She saw Jim Kirk grinding himself up against a very enthusiastic Caitian cadet she'd been paired with for one of the hand-eye coordination tests earlier in the week, and Gaila perched happily on the lap of another, stealing his drink and charming him simultaneously.

The evening was cool, and a thick fog was starting to roll in. The street lights illuminated their path back to the Academy, but the fog, and the alcohol, blurred their vision slightly, making it seem as if they were the only people out there on the street.

Neither she nor McCoy spoke, but his grip didn't lessen on her hand, and actually tightened when the fog would part and reveal another person walking in their direction. The silence was verging on the uncomfortable, and just as she was about to break it by asking him about his medical training he stopped abruptly and pulled her sideways into a small alleyway between two shops.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

He looked at her strangely, then released her hand to allow his to rest on her face. Then he leaned in and kissed her. The kiss was soft at first, and a little hesitant, but when Christine processed what was happening she pushed back, deepening the kiss. His hands moved from her face to her back, sliding down towards her hips. She ran her hands across the breadth of his shoulders and felt a little tremor of desire begin to build deep within her. He took a few steps forward, making her back up until she felt the wall behind her, but her head was saved from a nasty knock by one of his large hands cradling her skull.

She shifted slightly, adjusting the angle of her stance, opening her hips, encouraging him to push fully against her and she was gratified by the solidity of his body as he did just that. The kissing became more urgent as his free hand moved down her neck towards her breasts and she gasped and jerked her hips as his thumb found her nipple through the flimsy material of her top. It was his turn to gasp, and then growl slightly, as she raked her nails carefully across his scalp with one hand and squeeze his firm backside with the other.

The alleyway was dark; there were no streetlights near its entrance and the fog masked them from anybody walking by. The spontaneity of the moment and the sense of privacy afforded by the fog made Christine a little daring, and she shifted slightly to allow herself access to the zip on the front of McCoy's jeans.

That made him break away from kissing her, and he half laughed, half gasped as he caught her smaller hand with his larger one.

"Christine," he began, his voice sounding a little strained, but his words left completely as she got the zip undone and she delved inside. His erection was impossible to ignore, and although the light levels meant that she couldn't see very much at all, her first impression was of hard steel under soft velvet and a size that definitely put Roger to shame.

"Oh God," he groaned, leaning forward and putting his head on her shoulder as she carefully stroked up and down with her hand.

"Feels good?" she enquired solicitously.

"Never better," he gasped, and she laughed in pleasure at his reaction and her daring, to be in complete control of this handsome near-stranger in this dark little corner of this new city. She considered her next step; their position was too awkward to keep going with her hand, and her wrist was starting to cramp up, but the floor was an unknown quantity. Just as she came to the conclusion that she would tug McCoy's jacket off to save her knees from the floor he let out a long, heartfelt groan and her dilemma was over.

"Wow," she said, after a moment.

He said nothing, just panted into her shoulder. She moved her hands to his shoulders and kept them there, smoothing the hair at the nape of his neck for a while.

"Sorry," he mumbled eventually, not quite meeting her eyes in the darkness. "That was a little quick."

"Been a while, huh?" she asked sympathetically.

"Yeah," he admitted. "Pam and I...we…we hadn't…"

"Sssh," she soothed, leaning forward to kiss him again. "Don't worry. It's a pretty big compliment, if you think about."

"Is that so?" he said, his voice holding a tiny, tiny hint of humour amongst the embarrassment.

"Sure it is," she said, as he tucked himself back inside his underwear and zipped himself back up. "I'm so gorgeous that you couldn't wait for me to decide whether I was going to let you come in my mouth or my hand."

"That's…quite an image," he said, with a loud exhale of breath.

"And it's okay," she stressed. "Because God only knows what's on this floor."

He laughed then, an honest laugh, and the weird tension that had started the second after his orgasm finished disappeared.

"I wasn't really thinking about that when I brought us in here," he admitted, pulling her in for close hug.

"Men," she said airily. "Never thinking of the details."

"I was thinking that I couldn't go another step without wanting to touch you," he admitted. "I didn't want to get back to the Academy and start all that small talk about whose room and…"

"Shut up," she said affectionately. "This," she said, pulling back a little so she could gesture at him and the alley way, "was a bit of a first for me. Definitely not something I would have done with…"

"Roger?" he finished, and she nodded.

"Man's an idiot," McCoy said after a moment's careful consideration, and some little part still inside Christine, the part that followed the rules and read the instructions and did the sensible thing and was still in shock over the loss of her fiancé, just threw its head back and laughed. The rest of Christine followed suit. She clung to the firm, sturdy length of him as the unladylike snorts of laughter came bubbling out of her.

"I take it that Pam wouldn't have been up for a little fun in an alleyway either?" she asked.

"God no, if it wasn't in a bed, then it didn't happen. And God forbid the sheets were the wrong threadcount," he said, with the bitterness of the newly-divorced still fresh in his voice.

"Roger would be shocked at the very thought of it," Christine said solemnly. "Woman on top was as adventurous as he got."

"Really?" he asked, moving her slowly but surely back towards the wall. "So he's not the type that would go down on you in an alleyway when anybody could be walking past not metres away?"

"Hah!" Christine said bitterly. "He's not the type to go down on me at all..."

Her unfavourable thoughts towards Roger flew straight out of her head as her back made contact with the wall again, and McCoy carefully stopped her head from banging with his large hand, and stopped her mouth from working with a firm, demanding kiss.

With his free hand he started yanking at the material of her skirt until he raised enough of it to reach her underwear. She hissed in pleasurable surprise as his long, skilful fingers slipped underneath the elastic and straight up into her.

"I said it before," he mumbled against her lips. "Man's an idiot."

She didn't have time to respond, or to breathe. He slowly moved to his knees, tugging on her skirt and her underwear until it pooled around her feet. He carefully lifted one of her legs, dropping a small kiss on her calf as he did so, and rested it over his shoulder. She clutched at the wall and at his head for balance as he slowly and carefully licked his way right up to her clit, which seemed to be inexplicably aching.

When McCoy set himself a task, she realised, he didn't stop until the mission was achieved. He was relentless in the way that he set about bringing her to orgasm, pausing only to minutely adjust angle or pressure according to her breathless commands. She thought he'd stop after she'd come for the first time, but apparently he had a plan that she knew nothing about and she'd panted her way through another two before she pulled hard on his hair to get him to look up at her.

"Stop," she wheezed. "Or I'm going to be orgasmed to death."

"Well," he deadpanned, "if you've gotta go…"

She laughed again, and she was struck by how much she'd laughed that night, compared to the last few weeks. And, she realised, for the last few months, too.

They separated for her to gain her balance and to redress herself, and for him to discreetly fish a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe his face clean.

He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and she slipped her arm around his waist, and together they left the alley and headed back towards the Academy. The tension of their previous walk was gone, and they spent their time in contented silence as they walked through the streets and onto the Academy campus. They slowed as they reached a fork in the path.

"I'm in block three," Christine gestured. "But my roommate wasn't going out tonight, so she'll still be there."

"I'm in block four and my roommate will probably still be out until ten minutes before tomorrow's testing," McCoy said, rolling his eyes. "But I can't guarantee that."

"I'd prefer to keep this between ourselves," Christine told him.

"I can understand that," he said gravely.

"So I'll see you around," she said, smiling. "Thanks for tonight McCoy, it was…something special."

"I'd offer to walk you to your door," he said carefully, "but I think that's a bit…"

"Relationshippy? Yes," she agreed. "And I think I can remember the way to my room. You're good, but you're not that good."

He grinned. "Then I'll have to work on that," he said, putting his hands in his pockets. Night, Chapel."

"Night, McCoy," she said, and strolled off down the path would lead her to her building. The campus was quiet and she didn't hear his footsteps start down his path until she had reached the limit of his eyesight in the light fog that was drifting through the campus grounds. Old fashioned manners were a hard habit to break, she thought, and gave him credit for not forcing his company on her all the way back to her building when he clearly thought that was the correct thing to do.

Her roommate was asleep when she let herself in to their shared accommodation, so she was as quiet as possible as she showered in their tiny bathroom and prepared for bed. Her whole body was still tingling from McCoy's expert attention and she felt like blasting music loudly and dancing across the room in celebration of her body feeling alive again. She briefly considered whether she was _quite _so angry with Roger anymore, considering that McCoy had managed to make her forget him and what she now realised was his sub-standard lovemaking for most of the evening.

No, she decided, she was still furious with Roger, for the deception and the cheating and the lack of professional conduct, and now she could add denying her amazing sexual experiences to the list. It was her duty, she decided, to chase down as many amazing orgasms as she could as a fuck-you to Roger.

She fell asleep easily, and dreamed of foggy streets and strong hands.

Chapter Four

She didn't see McCoy for the rest of the week, as more rounds of testing kept them apart. She was glad, in a strange sort of way – sex with him was supposed to be non-complicated and unscheduled, and she didn't feel ready to face him so soon after their first time. As glad as she had been that she'd had the guts to proposition him so wantonly, she hadn't really thought about the effect that sleeping with somebody other than Roger would have on her. Not that they'd actually slept at all, but, semantics aside, that little trip into the alleyway had affected her more seriously than she'd thought it would. She'd had strange little flashbacks at the oddest times – walking back from a test in the fog, while grabbing the hand of another cadet during a physical test, standing against a wall when an admiral walked past. She needed a little time to find her equilibrium.

On the last day of testing, the results were posted on the big information screen in the main entrance to the Academy. As well as listing those candidates who had failed to pass the basic entrance examinations, it listed next to your name the department that you would be studying under – medical, command, science, engineering and a half dozen others – and the course that you would be taking for the next four years. All officer cadets had to have a specialisation, even command cadets. Christine had listed her choice as M.D training, and the recruitment officer had assured her that her previous study would mean that she'd be able to skip some of the required courses. Instead, the big screen listed her specialisation as nursing.

Nursing?

Had she failed some of her examinations? Had there been an administrative error? Nursing wasn't what she wanted to do. Nurses took orders, not gave them. Nurses wiped brows and passed surgical tools, not cured illnesses and saved lives.

There had to be a mistake.

Christine wheeled around, in order to march over to the administration desk and demand to know what was going on, when she ran head first into what felt like a brick wall. It wasn't a wall, she discovered as she recoiled. It was merely an incredibly large security officer who had to have about 0% fat and a serious exercise addiction.

"Cadet Chapel," she said quietly but firmly. "I am to escort you to Admiral Marcus' office. Follow me."

Christine swallowed heavily and nodded. Cadets gave her wary looks as she passed them with her escort, but they were too busy grabbing their friends and discussing the test results to really care why Christine was walking with some speed across the concourse to the turbolifts.

The security officer was silent as the lift sped upwards, so Christine didn't try to engage her with small talk. She followed the larger woman down corridor after corridor until they had to pass a special security checkpoint that led them out of the Academy buildings and into Starfleet Headquarters.

Christine hadn't been into this building before so she ensured that her fast-walking escort didn't get too far ahead of her. There were a confusing number of turbolifts and corridor junctions, and a lot of people who moved with efficiency and purpose around the building, ignoring Christine in her cadet reds.

Her escort stopped at a set of doors halfway down a long, grey corridor. "Admiral Marcus' office," her guide told her, and walked swiftly away. Christine took a deep breath, tried to calm her pounding heart and used the door controls.

The door opened onto a small reception area with a few chairs, a small glass table with models of starships sitting on top and a desk with an Andorian yeoman sitting behind it. Christine went up to the desk and stood to attention.

"Cadet Chapel, reporting as ordered," she said carefully. Yeomen were enlisted, and as such were under the authority of officers. As an officer cadet, she'd have the authority to command yeomen such as this receptionist in a few years. However, as an officer cadet, she didn't have the authority to command anybody to do anything at this precise moment in time. You had to be careful; being rude and demanding now could get her into a hell of a lot of administrative trouble later. Yeomen ran the bureaucracy of Starfleet, and many cadets had made the mistake of being rude to a yeoman and then paid the price by having their room reallocated every third day and other such administrative revenge. Carol had made that mistake and had warned her heavily about not repeating it.

"The Admiral will see you when it is convenient," the yeoman told her. "Please take a seat and wait, Cadet."

"Thank you," Christine said, and broke from her formal pose to take a seat at the small table. The room was silent apart from the soft noise of the yeoman's fingers as they flew across his or her work station. Christine wasn't able to read the incredibly subtle biological cues that would tell her if the yeoman was male or female, and which of the two sub-genders he or she belonged to. She shivered slightly; the room was cooler than the usual standard temperature, probably because the person who sat in it most of the day was used to the freezing temperatures of their home planet. Even this reduced temperature must be incredibly warm for him or her, Christine realised, and thought yet again about the possibility of being stationed on a planet as hot as Vulcan, or as cold as Andoria, and how she would cope.

A small alert sounded from the yeoman's work station, and they looked up to address Chapel.

"The admiral will see you now," the stern-faced receptionist told her.

Christine stood, smoothed her uniform down and nodded to the yeoman, who ignored her in favour of their data screen.

She tried to remain calm as she headed into the admiral's office, although her mind was racing. Getting pulled into an admiral's office barely a week after enlisting in the fleet could not bode well for her future career. Had she done anything wrong? She didn't think so – apart from that hook-up with McCoy, she hadn't had time to do anything but complete the mandatory testing that took up all of her week. Consensual sexual encounters between cadets weren't against the rules, she'd checked, and although he'd been a little buzzed, he hadn't been drunk.

She reached the desk, and moved stiffly into the salute that she'd been taught on the first day.

"Cadet Chapel reporting as ordered, admiral," she said. The admiral ran an appraising eye over her.

"At ease, cadet," he said eventually. He didn't offer her a seat, so she didn't sit in one of the uncomfortable looking bucket chairs that sat across from his own, larger chair. The bucket seats were low to the ground, and would put the sitter in the uncomfortable position of having to look up at the admiral from a submissive position. She couldn't roll her eyes at the obviousness of the gambit, but she marked the fact against Admiral Marcus in her mind. Surely an admiral would be secure enough in their power without needing to reinforce it like that?

She shifted into the at ease position and remained silent until the admiral spoke again.

"I have been reviewing the test results of this year's first year cadets," he said, looking at her directly in the eye. Christine fought with her body and stopped herself shifting under his steely gaze.

"Yes sir," she said neutrally.

"Your results have…interested me, cadet," he went on, stabbing at the datascreen with a stubby finger.

"Yes sir," she repeated.

"Do you know what these tests have been in aid of, cadet?" he asked her, staring at her again with an intensity that made her feel incredibly uneasy.

"Sir, the tests are a method of checking each cadet's knowledge and skill areas, and are used to create a personalised educational plan for the cadet's first year. Also, psychological tests are used to decide whether a cadet can cope with the stresses of service in the fleet, sir."

"Textbook answer, Chapel," the admiral replied, but his voice contained a sneer that Christine did not like. "Your test results have been quite unique."

Christine's grandmother had been an English teacher, and so it was with only the greatest of internal discipline that Christine didn't wince at the modifier in front of unique. She could hear her grandmother thunder at her. em_"Something can't be quite unique, any more than an event can be extremely historic! Good God, who the hell do I have to beat with a stick until schools stop letting barely literate morons graduate!"/em_

Christine couldn't let herself smile in front of the admiral, but internally she was grinning like a loon. If her grandmother had been in the room, she'd have corrected the admiral immediately with absolutely no respect for his rank or authority. She wouldn't have lasted more than five minutes in Starfleet, but boy, what a five minutes those would have been.

The admiral was staring at her in a way that quite clearly meant that he expected a response from her.

"Unique in what way, sir?" she asked.

"Let's just say your psych profile combined with your IQ test and a few other results has had you flagged as a cadet with potential, Chapel," he said, staring at her again.

The urge to roll her eyes was huge, but she gamely resisted.

"Potential for what, admiral?" she asked, as politely as possible. God, her grandmother would have a field day with this one.

The admiral stared at her again, not answering the question. Just as Christine was feeling incredibly uncomfortable, he leaned forward over his desk and pushed at the intercom button.

"Shav, I'm going to privacy lockdown delta seven," he barked.

"Privacy lockdown delta seven initiated, admiral," the yeoman replied. "All cameras and microphones are now deactivated. Intercom will be locked to your console."

As the yeoman spoke, the windows shaded themselves, blocking light from the late afternoon sun. Another privacy feature, Christine noted; although Admiral Marcus' office was ten storeys in the air and nobody could just peer in the window unless they were in a shuttlecraft, now nobody could see what was going on in the room.

"The conversation that we will now have will not have officially happened, cadet. Privacy lockdown delta seven means that computer records of your visit here today will be redacted to show that you were elsewhere on campus. The tracking chip in your communication device will be altered to put you in the gym. Your presence on security cameras on your way to and from this office will be erased, and footage captured previously will be edited in to show you were working out. My schedule will have me meeting with engineers regarding a new warp engine design. In short, cadet, this meeting will never have happened. Are we clear?"

"Yes sir," Christine said immediately, her heart racing. This was clearly not a normal situation.

"You will be monitored after you leave this office, and should you mention anything about the fact that you were here, or if you discuss the content of our meeting, your presence at Starfleet will be terminated. Do you understand?"

Christine swallowed, hard. Terminated could mean one of two things, and she'd be willing to bet that she wouldn't just be put on a shuttlecraft with a suitcase.

"Understood, sir," she said, meeting his gaze with hers. Show no weakness had always been her grandmother's advice, and it seemed to fit here just perfectly.

The admiral nodded, and stood up. He made his way to the replicator and ordered a scotch.

"What's your poison, cadet?" he asked, his hand hovering over the control panel. On seeing her hesitation, he smiled. "You're going to want a drink after this meeting," he advised, not unkindly.

"Vodka, neat," Christine said, and the admiral replicated a glass.

"Sit," he ordered, handing her the vodka, and she sat in one of the uncomfortable bucket chairs, clutching the glass in her hand.

"Starfleet is an organisation dedicated to exploration and research," he said, sitting in his chair. "Our mission is to meet new races and establish friendly dialogue in order to offer Federation membership to those that wish to join us. Our aim is to find new planets and new civilisations and to bring peace to the universe."

Christine, unsure of what to say, nodded.

"And while we strive to these noble aims, there are times when to achieve them, we have to use methods that are slightly less than noble. In order to achieve peace, we must commit violence. In order for there to be freedom, some must not be free. In order for there to be an unhindered sharing of ideas and information, secrets must be kept."

Christine nodded again, and knocked back her drink in one long swallow.

"Section 31 is dedicated to protecting the United Federation of Planets from enemies outside and within. Everything we do is for the greater good of the Federation and the fleet. We are not officially acknowledged. We don't submit reports and we are not accountable to anybody for our actions. Our mandate is to preserve the Federation, and that's it. Our methods are our own. Our agents are unacknowledged. We look for those who display a certain…flexibility of character. They are smart, they are dedicated and they get the job done. I think you have the potential to be one of these agents, Chapel. What do you say?"

Christine rolled her empty glass between her hands and stared at the floor, thinking long and hard about what she had just heard, and the implications that it had for her future.

Well, she had wanted a change, hadn't she?

"I think that I'm going to need another drink, sir," she said, looking up into the admiral's unblinking face.

He smiled, and pushed his glass across the table. She picked it up and took a long swallow. The scotch burned on its way down, but there was a strange aftertaste that sat in her mouth.

"Drug?" she managed, her vision starting to cloud.

"Welcome to Section 31, cadet," the admiral said, just before the world went cold and dark.

Chapter Five

She woke in a strange room. Her first impressions were of icy coldness, and when her head had cleared enough for her to struggle to a sitting position, she realised that she was lying on a cold metallic table, completely naked.

That was enough to get her to her feet. Her head cleared pretty quickly, and she scanned the room desperately for something, anything, to cover herself with. The room was small, made from the same bland grey utilitarian materials that were used in cheap buildings all over the planet. Other than the metal table, which turned out to be some kind of medical gurney, she realised, the room had a basin, a few empty cupboards and an overhead light, stuck on a dim setting.

Her first response was to cover her nakedness with her hands, but she soon realised that she had fewer arms than were required for the job. Rather than make the difficult decision between covering her upper or lower body, she forced herself to drop her arms. Yes, she was naked, but now she could have slightly more control over her environment.

The door to the room was open, and she peeked out into a drab hallway that extended in both directions. Every so often the grey wall covering, devoid of markings or identification signatures, broke to reveal a door. Another, slightly more thorough search of her room didn't reveal any new information about her location or how she'd got there. Her clothes were still missing too. She guessed that this was some kind of bizarre Section 31 induction test, although why they felt it necessary to strip her naked for it…

Because I said I wasn't confident with my body, she thought. If they'd been monitoring her test scores, she realised, a waterfall of thoughts cascading through her brain, then they'd very likely been monitoring her too, and she'd said to some of the women in the changing room for the physical tests how she didn't like the rather skimpy physical training uniform. And McCoy, she'd said to McCoy…

Not now, she thought hurriedly. No time to think about him now. Not here. Use what made her uncomfortable and scared against her, would they?

Forget _that._

Seeing no other option, and now angry rather than scared, she marched out into the corridor. She went right, for no other reason than she instinctively turned that way. She opened every door she came to, and discovered room after room identical to the one that she had woken up in. She methodically went through all the cupboards, and every so often found an item that could be of use. She found a sheet in one room, and she wrapped it around herself gratefully. Another room gave her an old-fashioned screwdriver.

She tried to think that the tool had nothing to do with her drink order on her night out. She began to flush scarlet as she thought of Section 31 somehow tracking her that night and witnessing her time in the alley with McCoy.

Now decently covered, and armed with a pointy weapon that had the bonus use of unscrewing things, she set off again. Again, she found more of the same – room after room of empty metal tables and unused cupboards. There were no people, there was no noise other than that of her footsteps and even they were dulled by the cool, smooth flooring. That was what was freaking her out the most, she realised, as she rifled through another set of empty cupboards. The lack of noise.

She'd mentioned that to one of the psychologists she'd met while going through her evaluations. She'd been asked about her dreams, and she'd mentioned a semi-recurrent nightmare about being deaf, and nobody around her noticing.

What else had they in store for her, she wondered, as she stamped back out into the corridor. What other goodies had they culled from her psych evaluations and test scores and chats in line at the cafeteria?

She looked ahead of her, at a seemingly unending row of unopened doors. Behind her lay an identical sight. She'd tried to keep track of how many rooms she'd checked, but she'd lost count somewhere in the mid-twenties. After she'd found the screwdriver, she'd scratched a mark in the wall outside each room, but given up when she saw the wall absorb the scratch and then return to its pristine condition. That was odd, but considering the day she'd had so far, by far the least strange thing to happen.

There was no clue as to where she was. There were no windows or ventilation systems. There were no signs or marks on any of the walls or doors. There was no hum of a power generator or steady throb of an engine. There was just her, and her sheet, and her screwdriver.

Christine let out a long breath. God knows how long she'd been unconscious, and she had no way of telling how long she'd been wandering up and down the corridor. Tears began to prick at her eyes, and she firmly blinked them back.

"Alright!" she said out loud, looking up at the ceiling to see if a speaker suddenly appeared. "That's it! You've had your fun. I hope you all had a good time seeing me wander up and down your funhouse, but that's it. I'm done."

There was no sound. No door opened. Nobody appeared.

"This is a test," she said, adjusting her sheet carefully as she sat down against a wall and leaned against it. "I get it. You show you've been following me all week and you've gathered a bunch of intel on what makes me tick. Congratulations. Now stop."

More nothing.

"I should have said that I'm mortally afraid of beaches," Christine sighed. "Scared of sand. Frightened of those drinks in the coconuts with the umbrellas in them. Hammocks. Deadly hammocks."

She frowned.

"Oh, and nice trick with the drink," she said, addressing the ceiling. "I hope you went over my medical records thoroughly, I could have had a nasty reaction to whatever you put in it."

Silence ruled the corridor.

"You think that I'm going to get freaked out by the silence?" she asked the ceiling. "Oh, no. That's not what I do. Do you know what you do when you get freaked out by silence? You make noise."

She proceeded to belt out a couple of her favourite songs, deliberately off-key and hitting every top note somewhere to the left of centre.

"And now," she said importantly, "for a medley from my favourite musicals."

"Okay that's it, simulation over," somebody barked loudly, and all around Christine the corridor shimmered and faded away to reveal a large black room that had thin yellow stripes running across it to form squares. The wall on one side slid aside to reveal a pained looking official in Starfleet grey, carrying what looked like her cadet uniform.

"You can put this on now," he told her, not quite making eye contact with her as he handed her the bundle of clothes.

Feeling her most brave, and her most angry, Christine unknotted the sheet and let it fall to the ground. The man looked completely away from her, at one of the walls of the room.

"No need to preserve my modesty," she told him icily. "No doubt you all saw plenty."

His slight blush and a heavy swallow confirmed her suspicions.

She dressed slowly. As she was fastening her uniform jacket, Admiral Marcus came into the room.

"Dismissed," he said curtly to other man, and he gathered the sheet from the floor. He held out his hand for the screwdriver, which Christine was idly tossing in her hand.

"No," she told him firmly.

He looked beseechingly at the admiral, who nodded curtly. The man all but ran for the door.

"I take it that was a training exercise, sir," Christine said, still keeping a firm grip on the screwdriver.

"It was," he told her, staring hard at her.

"Did I pass?" she asked.

"Did you pass?" repeated the admiral, contempt obvious in his voice. "Cadet, you didn't even finish the test."

"I didn't?" she said, frowning. "I figured out what was going on. You were using data you had gathered on me to put me in situations I'd find difficult to deal with."

"I know, cadet, I oversaw the psychologists that designed the test parameters for you," the admiral said through gritted teeth. "All potential Section 31 recruits go through this test."

"So how did I fail?" Christine asked, confused.

"Because no other recruit has ever refused to carry it out, sat down and sang badly at the people monitoring their responses!" he all but bellowed.

"So you're saying I failed the test because I figured out it was a test?" Christine asked, tacking on a "sir" belatedly at the end.

"Yes!" Admiral Marcus said, waving the PADD he carried in the air.

"So, doesn't that mean that all the other recruits failed because they _didn't_ realise it was a test?" she pressed.

Admiral Marcus opened his mouth, stared at her, and shut it again.

"That was the assessment of some of the monitoring panel," he said gruffly. "Although not mine, cadet."

"Yes sir," Christine said, which she had discovered was a useful thing to say to a superior officer when there wasn't anything that you really could say without getting reprimanded for insubordination. She wondered if he had gone through his own version of this test, and if he was angry that he hadn't figured out what was going on. She really, really hoped so.

"You'll be escorted back to the Academy building," he told her. "You will be contacted at a later date for the next round of testing."

"Sir," Christine asked as he turned away. "May I ask a question?"

"You can ask, cadet. I may not answer."

_emDick/em_, Christine thought. "It's about my course assignment," she said. "I had applied to join the MD programme, not nursing. Were my test scores not high enough?"

"No, your scores were good. Very good, in fact," Marcus said, running his finger across his PADD. "But it was felt that you would best serve Section 31 –and, by extension, the United Federation of Planets, I may add – by training in a different field."

"May I ask why?" Christine asked, fighting incredibly hard to keep the anger from her voice.

"Nurses are useful," Marcus said bluntly. "You blend into the background. Nobody really notices you. Nobody would think twice about a pretty woman being kind to them, and they may say more than they intend. Nurses are always needed, especially out in deep space, and nobody will say no to being given another one on their crew. Nurses know how to save lives, Cadet Chapel, and they know how to take them, but nobody ever suspects a nurse because everybody thinks that they're not as smart as the doctor, so they're not as dangerous."

"Wow," Christine said, stunned.

"I know it's not what you planned," Marcus said, "but then, you never planned this – " and he waved around at the holosuite they were standing in. "Anybody can be doctor, Chapel, but not many people can be functional Section 31 agents and despite today's em_events/em_," he said heavily, "I still think you can be one of them."

"Thank you, sir," Christine said.

"With a _lot_ of training," he added, with a smile that didn't quite meet his eyes.

"Thank you, sir," Christine said again, biting back the retort that would have ended her career before it started.

"If anybody looks at your test scores, they'll find that you missed the cut-off for the MD programme by a small margin, but came out well for nursing. Act disappointed, but not put off. Somebody will come to escort you back to your room. As of tomorrow your class will be reassigned housing in the Academy. You'll have a private room."

"Thank you, sir," Christine said for the third time in as many minutes.

"It's not a perk, cadet," the admiral said sharply. "As well as maintaining a full course load, you'll be expected to train in other areas that nurses traditionally don't. Having a single occupancy room will cut down on the number of lies you'll have to tell to an inquisitive roommate."

Christine nodded.

"Enjoy your night, cadet," he said. "The real work starts tomorrow."

Before she could manage another less than enthusiastic "Thank you, sir", he turned and left the room. As soon as he left, the officer from before rushed back in.

"I'm to escort you back to the Academy building," he said apologetically.

"Yes sir, I'm ready to go," Christine said, turning towards him. As she did so, she caught sight of his hand raising quickly, and she heard the distinctive hiss of a hypospray.

"Son of a …" she managed, before feeling her knees buckle under her.

"You'll get used to it," she heard him say with a sigh, before the world became black.

Chapter Six

She woke up, fully clothed this time, on her bed in her room. Her neck itched slightly at the hypospray injection site, and she rubbed it absently as she looked around the room.

"You're awake then," her roommate said cheerfully. Christine propped herself up on one elbow as she watched the other woman pack her clothes into her suitcase in preparation for the mass migration of students the next day.

"Yeah, I decided to take a nap," Christine lied. "I didn't sleep much last night."

"It's been a mega-stressful week," her roommate agreed. "Did you get the course you wanted?"

"No," said Christine, and she didn't have to pretend to feel annoyed about that. "But close enough I guess. Did you?"

"I did!" her roommate beamed. "Engineering, with a speciality in warp engine design."

"Congratulations," Christine told her warmly. "I guess this means the end of our living together then."

"I suppose so," she said. "It's a pity. You've been a good roommate to have this week."

"You too," Christine said generously, and the girl had been an inoffensive roommate. She hadn't stayed up too late or hogged the shower or practiced naked yoga in the middle of the room. Christine just didn't like sharing her living space with people. It had taken her a long time to get used to Roger being around so much. At least working for Section 31 had some kind of immediate benefit, she thought, as she pulled herself off her bed and went to splash water on her face.

She took a deep breath and looked at herself in the mirror. Was this what a secret agent looked like? Blonde hair, brown eyes, washed out and pale in this stupid red uniform.

Not even a Section 31 agent yet, she thought. She had God only knew how much training to complete before that happened, and that training was the reason that she wasn't going to study what she had wanted to.

"Nurse Chapel," she said to herself softly, and sighed. It did have a kind of ring to it, she supposed, and it wasn't as if she didn't have a doctorate anyway.

_emSecret Agent Chapel/em_ flashed across her mind, the thought worming its way in. She couldn't help but grin. It was incredibly childish of her, to be sure, but there was something pretty damn cool about that title.

"Are you coming out with us tonight?" she heard her roommate call from their bedroom.

"Pardon?" Christine asked, popping her head around the door.

"There was a class-wide message from Cadet Kirk – you know, the gorgeous one, with those eyes?"

Christine nodded. He was too young for her, and was too cocky for her personal taste, but you couldn't help but admit it. He was gorgeous. And he did have those eyes.

"He's organised a beach party!" her roommate squealed.

"A beach party?" Christine asked, peering out of the window. "It looks a little cloudy."

"He says that the forecast is for clear skies," the other woman said dismissively. "Anyway. Shuttles are bussing us there and back, and rumour has it that he's skinny dipping!"

"That is far more believable," Christine said, shaking her head and smiling. "Skinny dipping, here? Only Jim Kirk would be stupid enough to go naked in the ocean at this time of year. And at night!"

"He had me at naked," drooled her roommate, and Christine laughed.

"Alright, I'm in," she decided. "Although I'm definitely not skinny dipping."

She'd been naked enough for one day, thank you very much.

The entire cadet class were laughing and shouting as they got on board a fleet of shuttlebuses that were waiting at the gates to the Academy. Everybody was dressed for the beach, although it was late afternoon and Christine didn't think that the swimsuits that lots of the cadets were wearing would get much use. She'd settled for a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, with a pair of lightweight trousers and a warm hooded sweater in her bag for later.

She lost track of her roommate in the commotion at the shuttlebuses, but she knew a few of the people around her on her bus, and she quickly fell into conversation about course assignments. She wasn't the only person who hadn't been given their preferred course, and she used the opportunity to try and sound enthusiastic about nursing. She was looking forward more to the extra, clandestine courses she would take, and the thought of lessons in computer hacking and weaponry were enough to cheer her up.

At least, she thought, she supposed those were the sort of things that spies learned to do. It would have been helpful if she'd had more to go on than the espionage thrillers that her father loved to read, but she'd have to make do with the information she had.

The beach had been pre-prepared, which made her wonder suspiciously at how much the whole party had to do with Jim Kirk. There were several spaces cleared for bonfires, with well-defined boundary stones ready to keep all but the most drunk away from the large piles of driftwood already stacked in preparation for being lit. The smell of meat cooking lead her to several big grills where unfamiliar people were already preparing food. Nearby, trestle tables groaned under the weight of side dishes and alternative dishes for those who didn't eat meat or fish. There was an honest to goodness bar set up past the food area.

"Who arranged this?" she asked one of the men next to her, who had, like her, followed their noses.

"Somebody said Kirk did it, but all he did was pick the location," the man said dismissively. "There's always a party organised by the Academy at the end of every test week. Who else would bring security staff and medics to something like this?"

He gestured loosely to some intimidating men who, although not wearing uniform, were clearly security personnel trying to blend in with the crowd. Across the beach there was a tent set up with the medical division's symbol, the Rod of Asclepius, stamped on its sides in blue.

Well, that was a relief, Christine thought. It couldn't get too out of hand if there were security personnel and trained medical staff around. A shout made her turn around in time to see Kirk gleefully throw his swim trunks into the air and go charging, buck-naked, into the ocean. That set off a whole herd of others, who followed his example.

Christine headed for the bar, and wasn't surprised to see McCoy standing there already, glass in hand.

"Not joining your friend?" Christine asked, after she ordered a drink from one of the bar staff.

"Strip naked with a hundred idiots and freeze my balls off in the north Pacific?" McCoy said, derision dripping from his voice. "Pass."

"Glad to hear it," she said, sipping her cocktail. "I didn't want to be the only person not joining in the fun."

They looked out at the long beach, and at the huge numbers of their class who were splashing around in the surf. Not all were naked, although many had followed Kirk's example.

"What's fun in swimming naked?" McCoy groused.

"You've never done it?" she asked.

"Not since I was a kid," he said. "Not since puberty, anyway."

He glanced at her sideways.

"And you have?" he said. "Swam naked?"

"Not since I was a kid," she said, smiling. "And definitely not since puberty, and very definitely not with a hundred other people."

"If you're going to do it," he said slowly, "it's probably better that it's done privately."

Christine nodded thoughtfully and looked around.

"Everybody seems pretty busy here," she noted. "I wonder what's around the headland?"

The bay that they were in had a long, curved beach, and was big enough to contain all the party plus the catering and extra staff that might be required. At the far end of the beach a headland jutted out into the water, but there was still enough beach left by the tide to walk around it.

"We could go find out," he offered. "Get away from all the kids."

From somewhere nearby, music started playing loudly, something achingly new and cool by a band that Christine had never heard of. Further down the beach, away from them, another music system was started, with a different song she couldn't identify.

"That sounds great," she said, "But let's pack a picnic. I'll go and get us some food, you get a bottle of something from the bar."

He nodded in agreement, smiling at her, and for a moment Christine got a blast of desire go right through her, starting right down low in her body.

This is what he was for, she told herself. For this feeling. For some fun. To remind herself that she wasn't too old and too boring for Roger.

She smiled back and left him arguing with the bartender over what he could reasonably expect to walk away from the bar with. Christine had better luck at the food area, and sweet talked one of the catering staff into giving her some of the boxes that would later be used to parcel all the remaining food up. She didn't know what McCoy liked, so she grabbed a little of everything, adding more desserts than were perhaps strictly necessary. Napkins and disposable cutlery were available in big tubs, so after a quick stop to get enough of those, she walked back to McCoy who was waiting at the bar.

"He wouldn't give me the good stuff," he told her apologetically, with a hard stare at the bartender who cradled his bottle of bourbon in his arms protectively. "But there's wine, and the vintage looks decent enough."

"You know about wine?" she asked as they made their way away from the noise of the party.

He shrugged. "Not really. It's not my drink, but Pam liked to entertain, and with the food came the wine. You pick up things here and there, and I can remember having this one. Not sure whether it's suitable for what's in those boxes, though."

"If it's alcoholic, it'll do," Christine said firmly. "Day I've had, I deserve it."

"Not good?" he asked, as they rounded the headland.

"It's been a bit eventful," Christine said, as honestly as she could. "I didn't get the course I wanted," she explained. "I'd hoped that I'd make the grade for the MD programme, but clearly I didn't. I got nursing instead."

It burned her to say that. She _had_ made the grade. She'd made it with points to spare.

"I'm sorry," McCoy said after a moment. "I suppose telling you that doctors couldn't do their job without nurses isn't very helpful."

"Not really," Christine said. "I mean, if I'd wanted to be a nurse then this would be great, but I didn't. It wasn't part of the plan. It's just going to take a while to get used to, I guess."

They'd made it around the headland, and the noise from the party fell away. There was a small cove, quiet and still, with a soft, sandy beach.

"This is nice," she said, after a moment of looking around.

"Yeah," he agreed. "Shall we stay here?"

"I've got a blanket in my bag," she said. "We can sit on it for our picnic."

She pulled the blanket, taken from her bed at the Academy, out of the bag and settled it on the sand near the top of the cove, away from the waves. They sat down and opened the boxes, and started picking through the food.

"Shit," cursed McCoy as he twisted the first bottle open. "I forgot to get glasses."

"We'll drink from the bottle," said Christine, shrugging. "It's not a picnic if you haven't forgotten one vital thing."

They passed the bottle back and forth as they ate the food and exchanged stories about picnics past. By unspoken agreement, neither mentioned their exes.

"And after that, we never went on any picnic again without a massive first aid kit," Christine finished. "Between my brother's new-found wasp allergy, my mother breaking her wrist tripping over the picnic hamper and my father cutting his hand on a broken glass, we weren't taking any chances."

"I'm amazed you went on any again after that," McCoy said, still smiling at the vivid picture she'd described of a terrible afternoon from her teens.

"My grandmother makes the best friend chicken you'll ever taste, but she only makes it for picnics," Christine explained. "It's worth the risk of serious injury to get your hands on some."

They both lay back on the blanket, empty boxes and bottle carefully tidied to one side, away from errant arms and legs.

The late afternoon light was beginning to fade, and the smell of smoke came from around the headland.

"They've lit the bonfires," Christine remarked.

"I hope to God no drunken idiot falls into one," McCoy replied. She wasn't looking at him, but she could just hear him scowl. He had a very sexy scowl, she decided.

"You know, that's pretty much what I thought when I saw them," she told him. "Great minds, and all of that."

"You don't really need them," he groused. "Not if everybody was wearing proper clothing."

"But what if you're not wearing any clothing?" Christine asked, pitching her voice a little deeper on purpose to see if it had an effect.

"And why would you be doing that in a public place?" he asked, his own voice getting a little deeper.

"Well," Christine said, moving from her position lying on her back to a kneeling one. McCoy was still lying down, so she moved so that she was all he could see. "There's the skinny dipping, of course. That's one reason to be naked on a beach."

Her bravery spurred on by the very good wine he'd liberated, she pulled her top up and over her head, and reached around to unfasten her bra. She let her clothing pile untidily next to her, but nobody paid it any attention. McCoy's eyes were firmly fixed on her, and her eyes on him. His hands reached up to unbutton her shorts, but she lifted them off.

"Not yet," she said. "Tit for tat, McCoy," and waggled her eyebrows as best she could.

"You want to see my tat?" he asked, pulling off his own shirt.

"I want to see _everything_," she told him, as she took in his naked chest. It was good, she decided. Solid looking, with enough chest hair to be masculine without it verging into gorilla territory. He wasn't ridiculously muscled, but he wasn't carrying much extra weight and there was some nice definition. She ran the palm of her hand over his chest carefully, letting her fingers drift over his nipples. He squirmed slightly and she smiled. Before she could do anything else he'd moved suddenly and caught her in his arms before rolling her underneath him.

It was his turn to do the exploring, but he used his lips rather than his hands. His firm weight kept her pinned beneath him, but it wasn't as if she wanted to be anywhere else right then. He took his time – this was no fumble in a dark alley. He had the faintest amount of stubble on his face, and the contrast between the sharp scrape of the stubble and the gentleness of his lips was doing wonderful things for her.

He allowed her to flip them over a few times so she could get her hands, and her mouth, on his body, but she was always gently returned to her back. Their clothes came off lazily, as if they had all the time in the world and the entire cadet class of Starfleet Academy weren't a hundred metres away. He used his hands on her this time, instead of his mouth, and she breathlessly told him that whatever sexual secrets he'd learned during his medical training, they were definitely worth knowing.

He lasted a lot longer than he had earlier that week, which she suspected was a point of pride with him. She'd felt the difference between him and Roger as soon as he (God, _finally_) entered her, and it wasn't just due to length and girth. He stopped when he was as deep as he could go, laid a very gentle kiss on her forehead and said her name quietly, almost reverently, before he moved again. It was a moment of sweetness, and she couldn't quite remember the last time that the man she'd been engaged to had been so sweet to her.

She pushed Roger out of her mind as she wrapped her legs around McCoy's back. He had no place on this beach.

"Next time, I'm on top," she told McCoy afterwards, as the sweat cooled on their bodies, aided by the chill wind blowing from the ocean.

"There's going to be a next time?" he asked, turning his head so he could see her.

Christine shrugged. "I suppose so," she said airily. "You've proved…tolerably good at this."

"You're going to pay for that," he told her, and despite her shrieks and a lot of kicking, he soon had her up over his shoulder as he jogged for the sea. With a shout he plunged into the cold water, and Christine found herself well and truly dunked.

"You bastard!" she spluttered.

"Well, you know us tolerable types," he said. "Unpredictable."

Then he grinned and swam back to the beach.

"I could have picked Kirk," Christine told him as she walked back up the beach to where he was already holding out a dry towel from his bag for her. "Kirk wouldn't have thrown me in the ocean."

"Kirk wouldn't remember your name," McCoy said kindly. "And probably expose you to a dozen interesting STIs."

"You have a point," agreed Christine, towelling herself thoroughly before pulling on her warmer clothes. "I suppose you'll do."

"Thank you," he said amiably.

"For now," she added, and got a towel flick to her behind for her trouble.

Chapter Seven

The morning of the next day was spent moving her belongings into her new room, which was the promised single. It wasn't as large as she'd like, but there was privacy and her own tiny bathroom which was worth the lack of space in the combined bed/study area. She slotted her belongings away quite quickly, and for a moment thought bitterly about the large apartment she'd walked away from, with its antique rugs and large, squashy couches and artwork she and Roger had picked out together. Her wardrobe there had probably been about the size of her new bedroom here, she reflected.

All change, that was her new motto. She'd wanted a change in direction, and this was it, in so many ways.

After lunch came orientation lectures for her new chosen field. Well, her em_apparently/em _chosen field. She didn't think that Section 31 gave recruits the standard lecture routine. She got to know her new classmates, and visited the library so she could download copies of her set texts to her PADD. In the first few weeks she had to find out which of her classes she could test out of, and which required her presence. As well as formal lessons in the classroom, she also had duty shifts at Starfleet Medical's various facilities as she shadowed experienced nurses and learned first hand the reality of life as a nurse.

She wasn't allowed to do anything more life saving that helping to move bed-ridden patients or fetch water to replenish the jugs each patient had next to their beds. She chafed a little at the restrictions placed on her; she knew how to draw a blood sample, she'd done it a thousand times during her research for her doctorate. She could read a patient's vitals as well as any nurse, or doctor for that matter. That too had been part of her previous profession.

It was all very difficult to cope with – she was used to being a respected scientist, and now she was being treated as if she didn't know the difference between a milligram and a microgram, and it rankled.

She had to take a lot of deep, calming breaths in the first few weeks.

As her timetable was different to most of the student nurses, it allowed her time to take courses that she wouldn't normally had time to study. Every cadet had mandatory training in how to handle phaser weaponry, but for most it was the basic course that only required them to be able to change the settings and hit a three fifths majority of their targets. You took the course each year as a refresher, and couldn't move on to your next year until you passed it. Christine had been sent a message from Section 31 informing her that she'd be taking the much more challenging advanced class as soon as she finished the basic testing.

Christine had never used a weapon in her life. It took her a distressingly long time to be able to hit her three fifths of the targets, and she needed all the practice time she could get on the target range. As the year progressed, her aim got better as the hours she spent there after classes ended racked up. The advanced class moved away from hand phasers and onto the use of photon grenades and phaser rifles. She stuck at it, and eventually got her scores into the "passable" range, then up into the "good", although it took some time.

Every cadet's timetable was jam-packed, which meant that after they finished classes and their mandatory exercise requirements and the studying required for the next test or research assignment or essay or practical exam, their few hours of free time were jealously guarded. There were a huge number of teams and clubs she could have joined - sports teams, drama societies, choirs, debate teams and so many more – but she didn't have time for any of them, because as soon as her day classes were finished, Christine usually had to spend at least two hours a night taking classes in other skills as directed by Section 31. She would have liked to have joined a yoga class, but Section 31 decided that she needed hand-to-hand combat training instead. She'd always enjoyed singing and she had a decent voice, but instead of joining a choral group she had to work on her computer skills, which were deemed abysmal by a Section 31 tutor.

When she had a free hour, she spent it in bed and despite having the privacy of a single room, she slept alone. She'd seen McCoy in passing here and there, but as a qualified surgeon already he only needed a few of the basic training courses that she was also taking. The rest of his time, she gathered, was spent at Starfleet Medical treating patients.

Her new life was exhausting, and she didn't think that she'd have the energy for sex even if she did have the inclination.

Section 31 had a training facility that she was taken to from time to time, but she didn't know the location. She'd be picked up in a deceptively plain car and sedated by a different agent each time. She'd wake up in the facility, be given a few moments to clear her head and then told what her test would be. Sometimes it was to check on her accuracy with various weapons, on other occasions she'd have to use her new skills she'd learned in her computer classes or her hand to hand lessons. She also had meetings with a Section 31 psychologist, where she was able to talk about her training. Something made her hold back; she didn't have confidence in the confidentiality of the smiling, bland-faced woman who sat opposite her. Instead of really telling her about her worries – was she ready for this, could she handle the secrecy of her position, what would they ask her to do – she spent a lot of time complaining about being rendered unconscious so often. She didn't think she was fooling the psychologist one bit, but she had to rely on her gut instinct. There wasn't much else she could do.

It was about eight weeks into the year when she first saw McCoy for any length of time, and that was only because medical cadets were scheduled lessons in the shuttle flight simulators at the same time as each other. She had a licence to drive a car, and although that had hover capabilities, all cars were limited by the manufacturer to a safe distance from the ground. She'd never had flying lessons in her life, so this was yet another area where she had to start right at the very beginning with a few hours of theory lessons before she was allowed in the simulator and then, much later, in an actual shuttlecraft.

He'd slid in beside her in the lecture theatre, but there hadn't been much time for anything other than a quick hello and how are you before the instructor started. Seeing him again reminded her that it had been a long time since she'd had the pleasure of his company, but she had a hand to hand class to run off to and he was due back on duty at the medical centre. He told her that with a frown; clearly he was looking forward to seeing more of her than the ridiculously short skirt of her uniform showed already.

Their schedules clashed ridiculously. The next time they had flight theory together she suggested they try and find a time, but it seemed that Starfleet Academy just didn't want them to have sex.

"I'd come over after my late shift tonight," he said, running a hand through his hair in frustration. "But I'm no good to man nor beast."

"And I've got a study session arranged until ten," she said frowning, fingers darting over her PADD. "Sorry. It's just not meant to be."

"I'm on my wilderness survival trip after Friday," he grumbled. "A week surrounded by clueless idiots in the jungle somewhere down in South America. Why the hell they just don't kill me now I don't know."

"And my half of the class go the week afterwards, meaning that the next two weeks is a wash," Christine said, flicking forward on her calendar. "This is ridiculous. Nobody told me when I signed up that I'd have to arrange sex three weeks in advance."

"A month," he replied gloomily, peering over at her calendar. "After you get back they've got me going out to the facility on Demos to recertify in a few areas. I'll be gone for the week."

Christine swore loudly, which made several cadets near her turn and look at her strangely. McCoy smiled.

"I didn't know you cared," he teased.

"I had forgotten how good you are with your hands," Christine told him. "Now you're being dangled in front of me and just when I'm getting excited they're yanking you away."

"Yeah, well, I'm feeling it too," he complained. "Your course load is insane. If you weren't taking so many classes this would be a lot easier."

"Alright everybody," the lecturer at the front of the room called, interrupting Christine's come-back. "I know that we're still covering the theory of flight, but several of you have asked to see the shuttlecraft simulators. As we've racked up the minimum number of theory hours, I don't see why we can't use the simulator bank today. Partner up, you'll be working in pairs."

"Hallelujah," McCoy muttered as they joined the rest of the class as they filtered happily out of the lecture room and into the gigantic space next door where the Academy kept row after row of shuttlecraft simulation units.

"Peer assessment time," the lecturer said happily as they all partnered up and stood by their simulators. "One of you will run the sequence of pre-flight checks, programme a flight plan and simulate a take off. If you get that far without failing the simulation, try the flight and landing with post-flight checks simulation also. Your partner will assess your performance against the checklist in your training manuals. You'll be graded, and then swap roles. This should take the rest of the hour. I'll be monitoring the readouts from your simulators from the office."

"And probably drinking a nice big coffee as he does so," Christine muttered under her breath.

"You can start!" the lecturer told them, and eager cadets began clambering up into the pod-like simulation chambers.

"After you," McCoy said, gesturing to the ladder.

"You're only saying that because you want to look at my ass," Christine accused, stepping onto the bottom rung.

"When it's such a nice ass, it's a shame to waste the opportunity," he said sincerely.

That made her snort with laughter as she made her way into the very small and cramped simulation chamber. Christine was tall for a human woman, and McCoy topped her by several inches. By the time that they had both taken their seats, it was a very crowded space.

McCoy looked unenthusiastically at the banks of readouts in front of him, all dark at the moment.

"You wanna go first?" he asked.

Christine shrugged. "I don't mind," she said. She looked at him properly, and frowned. Even in the dim lighting inside the room, he looked pale and vaguely panicked.

"You okay, McCoy?" she asked.

"Fine," he said stiffly. "I'm just not fond of shuttles, real or otherwise."

"You sure?" she asked, not convinced by his brusque answer.

"Just get your pre-flight checks started," he told her, reaching behind him awkwardly to find his PADD with the checklist on it.

"How about we make this interesting?" Christine asked as she began pressing the buttons on the console that would start the engine of the shuttlecraft and begin a run-down of the shuttle's electronic systems.

"Interesting how?" McCoy asked through gritted teeth.

"Whoever gets the lowest score on this simulation goes down on the other one," she challenged.

"It's a bit small in here," McCoy said doubtfully. "I'm not sure I can bend that way."

"You'd better make sure that you get a higher score than I do then, hadn't you?" Christine challenged as she pressed the button that checked the shuttle's intertial dampners were working.

"That won't be hard," McCoy said as he watched her fingers move carefully over the control panel.

"Why not?" she demanded, pressing the final button that relayed her flight plan (to the Moon and back; she'd always fancied trying that) to the shuttle's navigational console. She hit the engine start button confidently.

"Because you've only engaged the starboard engine," McCoy said dryly, right before the simulation pod rose, jerked, swung about in a wide arc and tipped ninety degrees to port.

"Oh like you're so good at this," she complained as the dashboard squealed, warning alerts sounded throughout the simulator and the words SIMULATION ABORTED came up in large red letters on the display.

She heard him laugh, and despite the fact that she had just wiped out on her first run she was glad that he looked less scared in the dim lighting of the simulator.

He tried his hand at the simulator next, but mis-programmed his flight plan and sent the simulator skewing sideways into the Golden Gate Bridge. Christine didn't let him focus on the main screen, as his obvious fear of flying was affecting him badly enough without having to watch their shuttle crash.

"Well," she said, unfastening her safety belt. "I guess that means that you win."

"We both failed," he pointed out, watching her in fascination as she slipped out of her seat and wriggled her way towards him on her knees. "You don't have to do this."

She paused, her hand covering his crotch where, despite his chivalrous words, she could already feel him start to get interested in the situation.

"I don't do _anything_ that I don't want to do, you understand, McCoy?" she asked, squeezing firmly with her hand. "If you're not comfortable then I'll stop, all you have to do is say the word."

"Don't stop," he blurted, and she laughed.

"Alright then," she said. "Now, you'll have to bear in mind that I'm working in cramped conditions and I'm a bit out of practice."

"Duly noted," he said, not taking his eyes off her hands as she unzipped his fly and reached into his trousers. Those were the last proper words he said for a while. She heard a lot of heavy breathing, a few low blasphemous mutterings and a very satisfied sigh as she finished. She'd been honest about the cramped conditions and the lighting was poor, so she didn't think that she'd really had the opportunity to do much beyond the basics.

"You don't drink enough fruit juice," she told him as she wiped her mouth with a tissue.

"That's…not what I'd expected you to say," he rumbled, tucking himself back into his trousers.

"You'd know what I mean if you could taste yourself," she assured him. "Try more pineapple juice. The ladies will thank you."

"Like I have the time or the inclination to think about dating," he snorted.

"I know what you mean," Christine said, fishing in her bag for a bottle of water. "Thank God we've got this. I'd go nuts trying to find someone who understood that I'm not looking for a real relationship."

"Yeah," he said, not quite meeting her eyes.

She opened her mouth to speak again, but a klaxon sounded from outside, signalling the end of the lesson. They clambered out of the pod and listened to their instructor, who was looking at a readout on his PADD and shaking his head.

"Not bad for a first attempt," he said, trying to sound positive. "But I'm glad that you all chose medicine, not aviation, as your specialist field. Alright everybody, I'll see some of you next week. Dismissed."

"Well, I've got to go," she told McCoy, who was looking gravely at her. "Hand to hand class. Try not to get yourself killed on your wilderness training, okay?"

"I'll see you in three weeks," he told her. "Bye, Chapel."

She left first, wondering what was wrong with him. He'd just gotten a blow job during a class – he should have been strutting around the place. Instead he was acting a little weird. She hoped that he wasn't going to back out of their whole mutually beneficial relationship. He was incredibly convenient, as well as incredibly attractive.

Chapter Eight

The rest of the year passed, if not quickly, then at least in a blur of classes, exams, practical tests and snatched orgasms when he or she had both the urge and the space in their calendar. The first time he sought her out specifically had been some months after their shuttlecraft simulation. He'd appeared at her table in the mess hall, agitated and tense. She'd invited him to join her, but he'd just sat there silently, jogging his leg up and down nervously as she tried to initiate conversation.

"I've got an hour," she said finally.

"When?" he asked sharply.

"Now," she said. "Then I'm due on the wards."

He'd nodded, risen from the table and accompanied her back to her room where as soon as she'd locked the door, he pounced. He wasn't aggressive in a threatening way, but it was clear to Christine that this time he was going to be in charge. His kisses were intense and his actions just on the pleasurable side of roughness. It was a different McCoy to the one she knew, and afterwards, after he'd come with a great sob, she'd watched him carefully as he rolled away from her to the other side of the bed.

"That was…different," she said diplomatically.

"Was I too rough?" he asked, glancing in her direction.

"No," she told him. "I liked what you were doing. You would have known if I didn't. I can handle a little rough sometimes."

He nodded, and they lay there in silence until she spoke again.

"What was it?" she asked.

"Who said there was…" he began, but she rolled over and grabbed one of his nipples until he swore and swatted her hand away.

"Don't you bullshit me," she warned. "Something's up with you."

She waited for confirmation, but none was forthcoming.

"It must be your ex," she said after a while, and the tensing of his body confirmed his guess. Micro gestures, the tiny movements of muscles in the face that gave away what a human really felt. Pretty much useless on other races, she'd learned during her Section 31 training, but pretty damn accurate on humans.

"I got some boxes this morning," he said eventually. "Some stuff of mine that didn't get put into storage when I first left. Must have come right out of the attic."

"That's not easy," Christine commiserated.

"You had some?" he asked, turning to face her.

"I had a video call from the new owners of Roger's apartment a few weeks ago," she said. "They found some boxes of my things thrown in a closet when they moved in, and they managed to trace me through my old neighbours. I had them ship the boxes to my parents' house. I haven't had a chance to look through them. It's clothes, I think. Some books too."

McCoy sniffed, and didn't say anything for a while. His hand reached out and found hers, and he traced a spiral pattern on the palm of her hand with his fingers as he thought, then spoke.

"Mine had some of my dad's things in them," he said eventually. "He had a bag that he'd take with him when he made house calls. His equipment. Some of his books. His certificates, framed, that used to be in his office."

"Your dad was a doctor?" Christine asked.

"Yeah," he said. "General practice in Georgia."

"Not a surgeon like you?"

"No, he liked to call himself an old fashioned country doctor," McCoy said, fondness tinting his words. "Although there were a few emergency tracheotomies here and there, and a couple of difficult births that never made it to a hospital."

Christine waited for a while before she spoke, unsure of his response.

"Your ex knew that these things were important," she said eventually. "She knew that you valued them and she made sure that you got them. That's a good thing, right?"

He let out a heavy breath.

"Yeah," he said eventually. "Yeah, I know. And I am grateful that she didn't just…"

"Ram everything into some boxes and stick them in a cupboard, then leave without bothering to pass them on?" Christine said brightly.

"Alright, you win, your ex is the worst," he grumbled. "It's just that…I should have brought that stuff with me to begin with. I shouldn't have left it there at all."

"Anger can make you do strange things," Christine told him. "You know that, Mr Psych Rotation. Stop beating yourself up over something that, in the grand scheme of things, is not a huge deal."

He grunted, not sounding convinced. Christine sighed.

"Fine," she said, deliberately sounding aggrieved. "Just think of the trouble that your ex had to go to, packing everything securely and finding out your address and driving the boxes to the post office and…"

"Alright," he said, rolling over so that he lay on top of her again. He kissed her to silence her list of annoying chores that his ex-wife had been forced to endure. The kiss continued past it's jokey start, and started to deepen into something more interesting, but an alert sounded from Christine's PADD.

"No round two today," she told him, sliding sideways out from under him. "That's my ten minute countdown alert."

She got into the sonic shower and shivered as the waves blasted her body, getting rid of the sweat and the smell of sex from her body. She pulled a new uniform from the wardrobe and dressed quickly.

"Sorry," she said apologetically as she grabbed her bag and her PADD. "But Lieutenant Commander McGarry hates it when we're late."

"She scares me," McCoy said, hunting for his underwear. "Go."

"You can shower if you want to," she told him. "Just don't use my water ration, I'm saving it for a day when only a hot shower can make you feel better."

"Thanks," he called over his shoulder as he ambled into the bathroom. Taking the opportunity for one last shameless ogle of his backside, Christine left for her ward duty.

Now that she was nearly at the end of her first year of her nursing qualification she was gaining in confidence on the wards. Her understanding of the theory behind her learning was unsurpassed and she regularly came top of her class in examinations. Her time spent interacting with patients was very different to a classroom, and in her year of training she'd learned that monitoring vital signs and administering medicine were only small parts of her job as a nurse. More important was to build a relationship with her patients; she had to learn which patients were frightened, and needed reassurance, and which patients needed cheerful company and kind words. She had to learn to bite her tongue and not respond to the patients who snapped at her with the same level of rudeness. She had to learn that their rudeness masked their pain and their fear, and that they felt powerless when they were confined to a hospital bed.

Starfleet Medical had several different care facilities and they were world renowned for their outstanding diagnosis and treatment rates. Not only did they heal sick and wounded Starfleet personnel, but also the families of those in the service as well as non-Fleet people who were referred their by their own local hospitals for specialist treatments.

At the end of her first year her practical experience hours found her assigned to the paediatric centre. It was decorated in cheerful colours and had lots of toys and games for the patients to use, but Christine found it the most difficult placement she'd worked so far. Children shouldn't be sick like this. All of the kids on the ward were suffering from diseases and illnesses that either weren't responding to standard medicines or were so new that the doctors weren't sure on how to handle them. Their eyes were dull instead of bright, and they all had at least one intravenous drip continually dispensing liquids or medicines into their systems. Some could make it out of bed to sit in the play areas, but some were so weak that they could barely move their heads on the pillows. Christine was there when one child died; she was logging the boy's vital signs and trying to make small talk with the tired-looking parents when the biobed started blaring out a distress call to the main banks of computers at the nurses' station. Doctors and nurses appeared from nowhere and elbowed the stunned Christine to one side as they tried to resuscitate the boy. She watched as they tried again and again to start his heart, going as far as to crack his chest to manipulate the heart directly. She had been instructed to escort the shocked parents out of the room then; she had to separate them from their dying son so they didn't see the gruesome lengths her colleagues went to in order to save their child.

She didn't know what to say to them, other than try to answer the barrage of questions they had about their son. When the grave looking doctor came into the room, his eyes full of pity, Christine had to excuse herself and find a store cupboard she could cry her eyes out in. After ten minutes her supervisor found her sitting amongst the saline kits and spare tricorders.

"The first patient you lose is hell," she said, not completely unkindly. "It's worse when it's a child. Ten times worse. But you have to keep yourself together and keep on going because you've still got patients left, Chapel, and they're not dead and they need you. So get up, wash your face, and keep going. Your shift isn't over yet. You have work to do."

She got up, scrubbed her face in the staff bathroom attached to the ward and went back to work. After her shift finished, she went to the nearest off-campus bar and drank more alcohol than she'd ever managed to drink before in one sitting. She was so drunk that the owner of the bar wouldn't let her leave on her own, and was threatening to call the police to take her to sleep it off in a cell. She managed to tell the bar owner McCoy's name, and half an hour later he turned up at the bar to take her home.

"Come on," he said as he hoisted her up onto her feet. "Time to sleep this off."

"He em_died/em_," Christine moaned into his chest as he started her walking for the door. "He was six years old, and he died."

"It's always bad when it's a kid," McCoy told her, his strong arms keeping her pinned to his side as he half walked, half dragged her along. "It's even worse when it's your first patient that dies."

"New rule," she told his chest. "Kids aren't allowed to die."

"Okay," he told her, flagging down a cab. "I'll tell everyone at Medical the new rule."

She didn't remember anything after that. She woke the next morning in her bed, still dressed apart from her boots. Her head was pounding and her mouth felt that some small animal had died in it. There was a big glass of water on the nightstand, and a hypospray with a note attached. When she got her eyes under control, she drank the water and read the note that told her the hypospray contained an old medical school hangover cure that was guaranteed to kick in after an hour. She took it and went back to sleep for another three hours, but when she woke up she felt much better.

She sought him out later, to thank him. He brushed her thanks to one side, telling her that someone had done something very similar for him once, and that she'd have to do it for somebody else in the future. They ended up in bed again, but this time it was slower, and Christine kept her eyes shut for most of it. For some reason she couldn't look at him as he slowly and patiently took her apart with his hands and lips. It felt too much like making love, and that wasn't what she wanted from him.

Section 31 had left her alone for a while. She thought that they understood that the end of year testing was hard enough on her without them calling her in for an evaluation too, but the day after her last practical examination found her sitting in the back of another anonymous groundcar with an agent and a hypospray.

When she came to, she was lying on a hospital biobed. She was fully clothed this time, she realised in relief, and she recognised her whereabouts. She was in one of Starfleet Medical's critical care facilities, or rather, she was in a holosuite programmed to look like one of the critical care facilities. She was surprised when Admiral Marcus appeared in the doorway to her room.

"Cadet," he greeted her. "This is your final examination for your first year."

"Yes sir," she said, standing to salute.

"Your task is simple," he said. "Your orders are to terminate the life of the patient in the next room."

Her first response was to protest. No. Her job was to save lives. However, as she'd been reminded constantly through the year by her Section 31 tutors, sometimes saving many lives required taking one single life. It wasn't often that she'd be called upon to carry out this task – after all, the psychologist had told her, most Section 31 agents are never activated and most do their jobs remotely, via computer. But some are activated, and some are asked to do this one thing that they have been taught since birth is the most evil and repugnant act that one person can inflict on another.

It's just a simulation, she told herself. It's not really real.

"Is there a specific way you'd like the job done?" she asked.

The admiral shook his head.

"It's up to you," he said. "But it should look natural. In your own time, cadet."

"Yes sir," she said, and walked as calmly as she could into the next room. The smells were all wrong, she couldn't help but notice as she made her way towards the still form on the biobed ahead of her. They could get the look of the place right, and the familiar sounds of the biobeds recording the vital signs of the patient were correct, but every medical facility had a strong smell of disinfectant that was missing from the simulation.

She stopped as she got nearer the bed. The body inside it lay still, a faint movement of the covers the only indication that person was breathing. It had looked wrong from the doorway but now she had crossed the room she realised why.

It was a child in the bed. In fact, it was the child that had died only two weeks earlier.

"No," she whispered.

"Yes," said the admiral's voice from behind her. "His mother is the leader of a large political party on Betazed. She had been threatening to raise the issue of Betazed's withdrawal from the Federation, but then her son got ill. His death will distract her from politics and make her step down from her party's leadership. Betazed will remain in the Federation, and many hundreds of trade and political agreements will remain secure. Their people will continue to flourish and the Federation will not have to cope with weakness that a defection of such an important planet will bring."

"But he's a em_child/em_," she protested.

"He's dying," the admiral countered. "It's an act of mercy."

"You don't know that," Christine said desperately.

"You do," he said flatly. "Look at his chart. Remember how you saw him die."

It came back in a rush; the awful sobbing of the parents, the shouts of the medical team that worked on him. His horrible, painful death. How much kinder it would be just to insert a syringe full of satricolamine into his IV and watch him pass away peacefully as his breathing stopped. It wouldn't show up on a post mortem examination – the medicine he was already taking would mask the compound in his blood. How she hated that she knew that, that despite her shock and revulsion some part of her mind kept ticking over, getting the job done. It appeared that they'd been right to choose her a year ago.

"He shouldn't have to suffer because of this," she said through gritted teeth, tears already beginning to sting her eyes.

"Your methods are up to you," the admiral said. "You can be an angel of mercy if you want."

She stiffened at that; there had been a lot of time spent during her medical ethics lectures spent discussing "angels of mercy", medical professionals with psychiatric disorders that found satisfaction in killing people they thought were beyond medical help. Their cases had fascinated her, as she could not understand how any medical professional could do that to somebody in their care. She looked at the readout on the biobed, and then over at the admiral. Now she had a chance to find out.

She left the room and headed down the corridor towards the supply closet where all the drugs were stored and carefully counted. She paused and ducked into the staff changing room, where she found what she was looking for – an open locker, with another nurse's identity card thrown carelessly in while the owner was in the shower. She took the card, exited the changing room and used it to swipe open the store room. She found the satricolamine, pocketed it and left. She appeared back in the patient's room and used the ID card to engage the privacy shield around the biobed, blocking both patient and nurse from view of anybody else in the room. She took the vial of medicine from her pocket and expertly loaded it into the IV line. She forced herself to look away from the boy in the bed as she depressed the syringe, and instead watched the clear liquid drop into the large bag of clear medicine already being carefully introduced into the boy.

Still looking away from the child, she used the sleeve of her uniform to rub away any fingerprints she had left on the IV stand. She disengaged the privacy screen and took the lock off the door, then put the empty syringe in the recycling unit in the corner of the room. Without looking back at the boy, she left the room and went back into the changing room. The whole thing had taken less than four minutes and the owner of the card was still in the shower. She wiped down the card and replaced it in the locker.

As she left the changing room the medical centre faded away and was replaced with the familiar black and yellow striped room. The admiral was looking at a PADD, and was clearly inputting data.

"May I ask how I performed, sir?" she asked.

"Well, you went through with it, which is a start," the admiral said, not looking at her. "Although you took your damn time about it, which is not a point in your favour. Your delivery method was good – the medicine you chose would have been undetectable in an autopsy, although it wasn't the quickest way you could have gone."

"It would have been painless," Christine couldn't help but say.

"That wasn't a criteria of your assessment, cadet," the admiral said dismissively.

"I know that I may be asked to kill, sir," she said, her mouth seemingly working independently of her brain. "But there is no need to be sadistic. The psychologist and I have discussed this."

They had, as well. They had talked about all manner of abstract things, including what happened to agents who found it a little too easy to kill.

The admiral's PADD bleeped, and he frowned as he stabbed at the screen.

"Your tradecraft needs to be worked on," he said, ignoring her. "You wiped down the IV stand and the card, but your fingerprints were on the bed and the control panel for the privacy screen. You also could have been spotted both taking and returning the card as you completely failed to assess the location of potential witnesses."

Christine nodded. She had, indeed, failed to do those things. However, as this was the first that she had heard of 'tradecraft', she felt that she had done a good job.

The PADD bleeped again, and the admiral nodded. "The judges have made their decision, cadet," he announced. "Your effort this year has been found satisfactory. You will move forward to the next phase of training."

"Thank you, sir," was all that she could manage.

"Your monitoring will continue during your leave time," the admiral told her. "Don't think that just because you're going back to Louisiana to spend time with your family that we won't be keeping track of you. The rules still apply."

"Yes sir," she said.

"Dismissed," the admiral said curtly, and the door to the holosuite opened to let him out and another stranger in.

Christine sighed, and turned to allow the stranger access to her neck. The hypospray hissed, and the next time she opened her eyes she was in her room again.

"One day," she said aloud, "I'm going to figure out how they get me up seven storeys."

Then she remembered the boy and the syringe and the drip, drip, drip of the medicine as it fell into the IV bag, and she vomited.

Chapter Nine

Three weeks of leave separated the first and second years of her training at the Academy, and she spent two of them at home with her family trying to sound convincingly excited about nursing before taking a shuttle to Titan to meet up with Carol for a week's indulgence at a spa hotel there. It had been hard to talk to her friend about her experiences in Starfleet without mentioning Section 31, but she had managed it. For all she knew, Carol could be Section 31 herself, and could have orders to silence her if she spoke about it. She doubted it – Carol was so sunny and cheerful and devoted to her work that she just didn't seem the type to be a potential killer. Carol had taken a lot of convincing about Christine's switch to nursing from medicine, but Christine thought she had sold the story well.

She had changed her ideas about the importance of nurses as the year had progressed. Doctors charged in and out of patients' lives, but nurses were the ones that they saw the most and who developed a better relationship with them. She'd come the top of the class, and she was determined to stay on top in her second year too. This year she wouldn't be so closely monitored during her time on the wards, and she'd be taught new procedures. She'd also be involved with surgeries after a period of observation, and she idly wondered if she'd see McCoy more this way.

He'd been a very pleasant stress relief during the past year, and they'd developed a tentative friendship outside of the times that they'd spent in bed. It helped that they were both still affected by their previous relationships. Although Christine liked to forget about Roger as much as possible, he was difficult to ignore in the media as he announced his plan to excavate Exo III. Every time she saw his distinguished features blazoned across a journal or an appearance of his on a science show, she was struck by the nastiness of their separation and the callous way he had treated her. Her grandmother had shown her solidarity and support for Christine by actually getting through to a radio talk show that was promoting his lecture series by pretending to be a fan, then letting rip at him on air. She'd eventually been cut off, but for three minutes and twenty three seconds listeners all over the planet had learned of his low character and bad personal hygiene. That last part had been a lie – he was nothing if not conscientious in that regard – but it had been fun listening to Roger's spluttering voice over the airwaves denying that he had raging halitosis and bad body odour.

It was very possible that Christine loved nobody as much as she loved her grandmother.

McCoy had been in touch via comm. link after her grandmother's little radio adventure. It was just a text message, but he told her that he'd never enjoyed listening to talk radio as much. She'd sent him a message back, and then they were in touch just about every day. No vid calls, just little wry observations on their everyday activities. They agreed to meet for a drink on their first night back, which didn't lead to their usual fun afterwards as Jim Kirk had tagged along.

The Leonard McCoy sitting opposite her in the bar this year was not the same as he had been the year before; nervous, ill at ease, distracted. He smiled more often now, although you would never describe him as a happy or relaxed person. He seemed calmer, and it was clear that he and his friend Kirk were close.

"So what's the deal with you two anyway?" Kirk asked, pointing first at Christine, then at McCoy.

"The deal?" Christine asked.

"You're not in a relationship, because otherwise Bones here would be sleeping somewhere other than our room. But you're not just friends either, because whenever I mention your name he growls at me to shut up and then throws something at my head."

"That's a fairly standard reaction to you," McCoy said darkly. "Ask Uhura."

"He's my flight sim partner," Christine said honestly. "And we hang out sometimes to get away from all you teenagers and your unusually active hormones."

"So you two old people swap jam recipes?" Kirk said, clearly not believing her.

"And talk about how the youth of today are so disrespectful to their elders," McCoy said heavily.

"What we are, Jim Kirk, is friends," Christine said, emphasising the "friends". "You should try talking to a girl longer than it takes to get her into bed. You might be surprised what could happen."

"I'm only going to be around for so long, Christine," Kirk said, shaking his head sadly. "I just can't afford to waste any time."

That got him pelted with the nuts and olives that were in the bowl on their table, so he retreated to the bar to get another round of drinks.

"I'm sorry about him," McCoy apologised.

"He's funny," Christine said dismissively. "Just ignore him. He'll stop if you don't react."

"You said we were friends," McCoy said after a moment.

"Well, we are, right?" Christine replied. "Otherwise this is a very confusing evening."

"You sleep with all of your friends?" he asked, the words coming out a little quickly.

"I don't really think it's your business who I sleep with, as long as I'm not risking your health," Christine told him coldly. "And you know that I'm not."

"Shit," he said, running a hand through his thick, dark hair. "Sorry. That came out wrong."

"We can stop," Christine said, although a pang of sorrow hit her hard at the thought. "If this whole arrangement isn't what you want any more…"

"No," he said forcibly. "No," he repeated, toning down his voice a little. "That's not what I meant, and I apologise for how I spoke."

"Apology accepted," Christine told him.

"I just wanted to know…I suppose I wanted…"

Christine took pity on him. "I'm single," she said. "I'm not interested in a relationship, just like I've been since I met you. What with the whole Roger thing, and the Academy being so intense, I just don't have the time or the inclination to get into the whole relationship thing again. I like what I have with you, McCoy. It's not complicated. You know that if I don't see you for a while it's not because I'm playing games, it's because I'm busy trying to cram thirty hours of work into a twenty four hour day. "

"I know that feeling," McCoy said, giving her a wry smile.

"I think you're very attractive," Christine said bluntly. "And you're really good in bed. I don't want to go anywhere else. I just don't want to make my life more complicated, because if I had to add "girlfriend" to the list of jobs I have to do every day, I think I'd finally crack."

That was true, she told herself firmly. That was a completely true statement. There was nothing in that statement that wasn't one hundred percent true. So why was it that she felt that she was lying to herself, if not him?

Their conversation was interrupted by Kirk finally making it back from the bar with a round of drinks, more nuts and a drinking game that eventually got them asked to leave the bar an hour and a half later. They walked back to the Academy together, parting at the fork in the path that separated their accommodation buildings.

"You need me to walk you to your room, Christine?" Kirk leered. "Since you and Bones are just friends and all."

"I value my non-STI status too much for that, Kirk," she told him, deadpan. "Go take a bath in some penicillin, won't you? McCoy can hook you up."

"She's too clever to fall for your lines, Jim," McCoy sighed. "Leave the nice lady alone."

"One day you're going to realise you're with the wrong guy, Christine," Kirk said, sounding completely serious, all big blue eyes and deadly intent. "When you do, you know who to call."

"I'll bear that in mind," she told him. "Now go and sleep it off. Night, McCoy. See you tomorrow."

"Eight am sharp on the wards," he agreed. "Night, Chapel."

Now she had passed her first year, Christine spent a lot more of her time on the wards. She began her observation of nurses assisting in surgeries, and soon started to take her own place. Now that she was based in the medical centres more often, she saw more of McCoy. They had a language class together this year, and by common consent partnered up to practice their Andorian. They were also in the same hand-to hand class, which surprised Christine. This was a more advanced class, which she had qualified to be in because of all of the extra hours she had spent the year before training for Section 31. She didn't think that he had enough hours logged, although a quick trip through his personnel file courtesy of her Section 31-sponsered computer classes revealed that, as a younger man, he'd studied judo. His ranking must have been enough to put him in the class, even though he didn't currently practice the art now.

Another surprise was the fact that the class was run by Jim Kirk.

"How the hell did you qualify to teach this?" she asked bluntly during their first lesson. "You're not old enough to be an instructor."

"Age ain't nothin' but a number," he said solemnly. "The Bible says that."

"I'm pretty sure it doesn't," she retorted.

"It's in the back somewhere," he said dismissively.

"Kirk," she said in warning, advancing on him.

"I was a pretty active kid," he said, backing away from her, arms raised. "My mom enrolled me in everything she could to use up my energy. The instructors said that learning martial arts would help me focus and be more controlled, so she signed me up for as many as she could find. I stuck with some. The Academy noticed, and I'm getting an instructor credit for helping lead the class. Don't worry, there's a qualified person here too."

"How's that control and focus working out for you?" she asked, unconvinced.

"Oh I can be em_really/em_ focused when I want to," he teased.

"Go away before I make those blue eyes black," she told him, only half-seriously.

"Just for that I'm making you partner with Bones," he told her.

She wondered why that was such a punishment, and then, after their warm up, she discovered why.

The man just would not attack her.

"Come on," she said, exasperated. "I have to practice this throw!"

"I don't want to hurt you," he said clearly embarrassed. "I'll ask somebody else to switch."

"Who says that you'll get the chance to hurt me!" she all but shouted. "Get over here and try to attack me!"

"I'm a lot stronger than you are," he said doubtfully.

"You're going to be in a lot more pain if you don't hurry up," she warned him.

He sighed, and advanced on her in the way that he'd been instructed to do five minutes ago. He was moving slowly and telegraphing his every move to make it easier for her, which did nothing but piss her off. The move they had been taught by their instructor and Kirk was a variant on one that she'd been learning with her Section 31 tutors, so she found it no trouble at all to block McCoy's deliberately fumbling attack and use his own momentum to flip him upside down. She added the arm twist just because she was feeling annoyed.

"You were being deliberately slow," she accused. "Do this properly, or don't bother doing it at all."

"Okay," he said, pulling himself up from the mat and rubbing his arm. "You're a lot better at this than I thought you'd be," he said grudgingly.

"Well, you're not," she said, deliberately trying to provoke him. It worked; he attacked her much more quickly this time, but he was sloppy due to anger and again he found himself laying on the mat.

"Want to swap?" she said. "Shall I attack you now?"

"I think you just did," he groaned.

There was a flash and a click, followed by what could only be described as an evil chuckle. They both looked up to see Kirk holding a PADD and viewing the photograph he'd just taken.

"I'm going to make a scrapbook," he told them. "Of all the times Bones gets thrown on his ass."

"I'm going to kill you," McCoy said flatly. "I know how to do it and make it look like an accident."

"Break it up boys," Christine said firmly, McCoy's words unsettling her a little. She'd tried very hard to forget the boy in the holosuite, and she'd never quite managed it.

"She's right, Bones," Kirk said. "You're not doing her any favours by holding back. She might have to fend off someone bigger than her one day, and they're not going to go easy on her."

"Alright," McCoy grouched. "Point taken. Let's go again."

They went again, and it was more difficult for her to throw him this time, but she managed it four times out of five despite their difference in body weight. He had a strength advantage on her, but he hadn't been practicing his hand to hand for the last year, and he hadn't had the benefit of extra training with Section 31 specialists. She could tell that he was annoyed that she had the upper hand, despite the height and weight difference.

"Next week, this will be different," he said at the end of the first session, a sweaty mess on the mat. "Be ready."

He said that at the end of every class for the next eight weeks, and each time he was wrong.

Their schedules were as busy as ever, but they still found time to meet in Christine's very useful single room for hand to hand of a very different sort. Something about the sex felt different to Christine, though; despite her firmly held conviction that she did not want or have time for a relationship with anybody, she found herself anticipating their encounters far more than she had done previously. Sometimes they were slow and languid, other times they moved with speed and energy but there seemed to be a greater emotional connection each time they met. He'd cling to her afterwards, resting his dark head on her breasts, and she'd comb her fingers through his hair until the clock said that one or the other had to move. On a few occasions, she'd found herself turning to him and the strength of his arms and she…well, there was no other word for it, she was _cuddled._ And she _liked_ it.

She never let him stay the night, though. To his credit, he never asked to, but she always made a point of stressing her other commitments. If she let him stay the night, she wasn't sure what would happen next, and she needed to be in control of something in her life. She'd had her life spin out of control as Roger suddenly ended their relationship, and she'd been shanghaied into secret agent training, of all the damn things, disrupting her own tentative plans for the future. This…thing she had with McCoy, it was easy and simple as long as she let it remain easy and simple. Getting emotional would just mess everything up.

It seemed that she wasn't the only person taking stock of her relationship with McCoy. She knew that sooner or later Section 31 would use their knowledge of her sex life against her in some way, and it came halfway through the year. She'd been informed that she'd be needed on Friday evening, and the car had arrived on time in the designated pickup place, never the same location twice. She'd submitted to the sedative without complaint, and came to in the holosuite once again. Admiral Marcus wasn't present this time, and she was wearing the uniform that she'd left the campus grounds in. There was a phaser on the ground next to her, and she noted that it was locked to a fatal setting. She kept it in her hand as she took in her surroundings. It was a corridor, simple and rather bland. It could have been any office building in any city in the world, or off it for that matter. The pocket of her tunic was weighted down – further examination revealed a small holo-emitter.

When she activated it, she recognised the face it showed as one of the people who sedated her for her return trips to the Academy.

"Your mission is to infiltrate the locked office at the end of the hall, retrieve the data chip hidden there and exit the building through the main doors, located through the blue door at the end of the corridor. Use any means necessary to ensure the data chip remains in your possession."

The holo-emitter jumped in her hand and she yelped in surprise as it suddenly glowed, became very warm and self-combusted. Shaking her hand to rid it of the ash, she scowled at the ceiling of the corridor.

"A little warning about your spy toys would be nice," she told the unseen observers. "Or gloves. Gloves would be good."

Rubbing her hurt palm on her side, she took stock of her surrounding. There were no other people around, and careful checking of the rooms in the hallway failed to produce either an access card or someone to open the door for her. The only alternative was brute force, so she used the phaser on the door lock. It ate through the circuitry and the door opened immediately. Christine was tensed for alarms to go off, but there was no noise other than that of her breathing.

She opened the door to the office room. It was more of the same – bland colours on the wall, a simple desk and chair in the middle of the room.

"Not even a pot plant," she muttered as she tried the drawers of the desk. They were unlocked. The data chip was sitting in the second drawer, just ready to be taken. Her hand hesitated over it. This was all too easy. Nobody for her to talk her way past, no need to use her defensive training or her computer skills – how on earth could this be a test?

There was only one way to find out. She picked up the data chip and tucked it into her bra. Her pockets were too shallow for them to be of any real use, and if somebody got close enough to try and retrieve the chip from her bra, she had a good chance at fighting them off.

She moved towards the door, but stopped suddenly as a figure appeared there.

"Give me the chip," McCoy said, walking towards her.

"No," Christine said, shaking her head, but whether she was talking to the false McCoy or the vicious creators of this latest psychological test, she wasn't sure.

She backed away from him and raised the phaser.

"Move out of my way, or I'll shoot you," she told him.

McCoy advanced. She shot. The phaser was set to kill, and her aim was true. She watched as she burned a hole through the chest of a man she considered a friend and a lover, and she continued to watch as he dropped to his knees, and then the floor. She checked for a pulse, and found none. Swallowing heavily, she stepped over his body and out through the door and along the corridor again. When she reached her starting point, the simulation faded.

The doors opened to reveal one of the agents responsible for taking her back to her dorm.

"There is a psychologist available, if you'd like to talk about this phase of your testing," he told her.

"I'm good," Christine said through gritted teeth. "Take me home."

"It's what they do," the man said quietly. "It's how they see if you'll cope. They pick someone they know you're attached to."

"I get it," Christine said. "I passed, right?"

"Yeah," he said. "Full marks."

"Good," she told him. "Now get me home."

She understood their point; Section 31's interests came above all else and one day she might be asked to make a decision between her mission, and her personal feelings. She hoped that she'd made her point too. She was committed. If it meant shooting a collection of holograms that looked like the man she was…a man that…a _friend_, then she'd do it. It wasn't as if it was real. It wasn't as if she loved him.

As soon as she came around in her room, she headed out for McCoy's building. The real McCoy, not the one she had just killed. The real McCoy. On another day, that would have been funnier. She hadn't bothered to change out of her uniform, and she hadn't even run a brush through her hair.

The door chime alerted him to her presence; one low, flat chime that buzzed for ten long seconds then stopped abruptly. It could only be her – he'd never met anybody who could make ringing a doorbell an act of aggression.

He palmed the door controls and it slid back to reveal her standing there in the standard cadet reds that they wore when not on active duty in the medical centre. Of course, he thought wryly, she wouldn't bother dressing up for him, or swiping a slick of colour across her lips. It was enough that she was there, clearly.

"This isn't a thing," she said brusquely, stepping past him and into the centre of the room. "Don't think I want to be your girlfriend, McCoy."

He let the doors close with a hydraulic swoosh and took a half step forwards. She had already pulled the release tab on her uniform jacket and it peeled off, falling onto the floor in a puddle of fabric. Her bra was black and lacy, and thrust her breasts forward in a decidedly non-regulation way. A seductive slide of her hips, and the skirt followed, revealing striking green underwear that clashed with the black and the red in a way that meant he couldn't take his eyes off her backside. She stepped out of her skirt, caught it on the toe of her boot, and flicked it towards his face.

"Nice," he said, catching it just before it hit him in the face.

"You're not naked," she pointed out. "This is easier when you're naked."

He watched as she perched on the end of his unmade bed and tugged at her boots. Her calves were so slender, he noted, that she didn't have to unzip them.

"For somebody who's not my girlfriend," he said mildly, still watching the show in front of him, "you get naked with me a lot."

"I should have known you'd be the old fashioned type," she said dismissively, flicking the catch on her bra. She paused to look at him. "Well?" she demanded. "Are you going to take your clothes off, McCoy, or do I have to do that for you?"

She let the bra drop to the floor. McCoy pulled his shirt up over his head quickly.

"That's better," she said, leaning back on her elbows. "Keep going."

He'd just been in the shower; he'd only had time to pull on a pair of pyjama pants and t-shirt, so there wasn't much to take off. Her eyes roamed appreciatively over him, and it wasn't only his ego that swelled at her attention.

She grinned as she wiggled her body back up the bed, leaving him room to stretch over her. He opened his mouth to speak, but she silenced him with a searing kiss that sent lightning bolts straight down to his toes.

"This isn't a time to talk," she told him with authority, then pulled the a move she had used once in Jim's hand to hand class and he ended up flat on his back with her straddling his hips.

"You have got to teach me how to do that," he said, his fingers tugging at the edge of her underwear. She lifted her backside obligingly and the bright green panties went sailing across the room.

She planted her hands either side of his face and shuffled upward, bringing herself down centimetres above his lips.

"I said, no talking," she said firmly. "Use your mouth for something more productive.

He was not a stupid man. He did as he was told.

"Well," he said carefully, after they were done. "That was…unexpected. You usually call first."

That was the wrong thing to say, he could tell. She recoiled from him, and gathered the sheet around her.

"I can go," she said, looking around for her clothes. "If it's a problem, I can…"

"Would you stop putting words in my damn mouth, woman?" he said irritable, hauling her closer. She battled for a moment, then gave up, laying limp in his arms. "I didn't say I don't want you here. I just meant that we normally use your place."

"You said that Kirk wouldn't be here," she told his chest. "Survival training."

Somehow, he didn't think that was it. God knew that they weren't always slow and gentle, but she'd been a wildcat in bed and he was pretty sure he had her fingernail marks all over his back. Something wasn't right with her. She always had control, in whatever she did and tonight it was like that control had just left her, and what he was seeing was the raw Christine underneath.

And what was with that girlfriend crap? He knew damn well what she did and didn't want, and he hadn't said one word about how he'd been feeling. Once the numbness of his divorce had worn off, he'd found himself more and more drawn to Christine. There were actual feelings involved now, although he knew he was a damn fool for having them. She couldn't have been more clear about what she wanted and how she felt, and he'd told himself that he respected that, and he was grateful for what she allowed him to have.

Now here she was, clutching him like he was a security blanket. He rubbed his hand along her arm soothingly.

"Something spooked you tonight," he said quietly. "You want to tell me what it is?"

"It's nothing," she said eventually. "Just stress."

"Alright," he said, not believing her for a second. "Okay, then."

He watched her eyelids droop and her breathing slow. She was falling asleep, and he wasn't about to stop her. Suddenly her whole body jerked and her eyes popped open.

"Sorry," she said, pulling away from him. "Today's just been really busy."

She began pulling on her underwear and McCoy sighed deeply. He'd lost his chance to get her to stay, something he'd been quietly trying to achieve for some time.

"No apologies necessary," he told her. "Stress makes us do strange things."

"Some of us more than others," she said ruefully. "Do you have a kit handy? I can fix your back. Some of those marks look nasty."

"You practicing unlicensed medicine, nurse?" he asked as he fished out a first aid kit from under the bed.

"I am being supervised by a qualified practitioner," she said absently, rifling through the kit. "Or so he tells me. Turn around."

He winced as she swabbed the scratches with an antiseptic wipe.

"That stings," he said accusingly.

"I seem to remember being in a similar situation before," she replied, clicking on the dermal regenerator. "And you called me a baby."

"I'm pretty sure that these are more significant injuries," he said, wincing as the regenerator did its work.

"You, McCoy, are an absolute infant of the first order, and I'm sorry for what I did to your back," she said, turning away to repack the kit.

"You're forgiven for what you did to my back," he told her, moving to look over his shoulder in the wall-mounted mirror.

"Do my efforts pass inspection?" she asked.

"Well, your practical skills are top notch, but your bedside manner could use a little work," he teased. "Do you maybe want to hang around for a bit, practice some?"

"I've got a class," she said apologetically.

"Right," he said, sighing. "Of course you do. I swear, the rate you're going you'll beat Jim Kirk to graduation."

Chapter Ten

Of course, she didn't beat Jim "I'll do it in three" Kirk to graduation as nobody in their year had a real graduation, in the proper sense of it. Half of their graduating class died, after all, and the rest were rubber-stamped through in order to get them serving as quickly as possible.

She'd been assigned the _Enterprise_, and had been yanked aside in the rush to embark by Lieutenant Commander McGarry, her instructor.

"There's a lot of you assigned to the _Enterprise_, Chapel. It's newly commissioned and hasn't got a proper crew yet. Most of the nursing staff is from your class and they're going to need you to keep them focused up there. Listen to the Head Nurse, keep a clear head and get the others organised. You can do it Chapel. Now, go."

It had been the last thing that McGarry had said to her; she'd been assigned to the _Farragut_. No hands survived.

When she got to the ship it was chaos. The corridors were full of newly commissioned cadets tugging on unfamiliar uniforms and running to their duty stations. Sickbay was slightly more ordered, with the CMO, Dr Puri, and the Head Nurse, Lieutenant Commander Janney, preparing for mass casualties. It was a drill that the nursing cadets had run a hundred times, and they snapped to their jobs quickly and efficiently. Christine was fitting sterile sheets to the biobeds when she saw McCoy lurch into the place, half-dragging a very sick-looking Jim Kirk with him.

"Don't tell me," she snapped as she helped move Kirk onto a biobed. "I don't want to know."

"Allergic reaction to the Melvaran mud flea inoculation," McCoy reported as Christine scanned Kirk with a medical tricorder.

"Why the hell were you doing giving him…no, I'm not asking. Standard anti-histamine shot?"

"Double it," McCoy said, putting his thumbprint on the screen of the tricorder she'd handed him, authorising the treatment. "He's going to need it."

"Better get changed out of the reds," she advised. "Puri will notice."

"Stay here," McCoy ordered Kirk, who waved at him weakly as he disappeared.

"Hey Christine," he said, waving a distorted looking hand at her. "Blue suits you."

"Thank you," she said absently, loading up a hypospray with a double dose of antihistamine and injecting him. "Stay here," she warned him. "Your hands are looking a bit strange and McCoy will need to see them when he gets back from the changing room."

She had to leave him then, to get on with her previous job of preparing the biobeds. She heard the announcement from the bridge about Vulcan and witnessed Kirk leaping up from his bed and making a break for the door, McCoy on his heels. She had just enough time to snatch up an emergency kit and thrust it into McCoy's hands as he went past her.

And then everything went wrong, in a very messy, explosive and bloody way. It was bad enough dealing with a constant stream of wounded and dying from other areas of the ship, but when Sickbay took a direct hit, well, it was beyond awful. Puri died in front of her eyes, shrapnel from the hull caught in his throat. She had tried to help him, but even as she worked frantically she could see that it was useless.

Most of their medical staff was from the Academy, including the doctors. She caught sight of McCoy in the chaos and hurried over.

"Puri's dead," she told him. "You're the only person with any real surgical experience, so I guess you're in charge."

"Shit," he cursed, wrist deep in somebody's abdomen. "Janney was down on deck five when they got hit. If I'm acting CMO then you're my Head Nurse. Get someone to come and assist me, and start triaging. Break out the tags as soon as they come through the door."

The tags were something that all medical staff knew about, and hated. When a patient came into a triage situation, they got tagged. Yellow tag meant non-life threatening injury. They were the lucky ones. They could wait for treatment. If you got a red tag it meant that you needed to be seen as soon as possible and if you were lucky, you wouldn't die while a doctor could be found. Black tags were put on people who were either dead on arrival, or whose injuries were so severe that trying to help them would put red tags at risk of death. Black tags got a hefty shot of whatever painkiller could be spared, and that was it.

The tags went against every instinct they had to try and help as many people as possible, but they were a necessary evil. In an emergency triage situation, you just couldn't save everybody. It was a harsh fact, and the triage training drills often reduced trainee doctors and nurses to tears. They were designed that way on purpose to make people realise the harsh reality of the life that they were choosing. The most common mistake made by trainees was to red tag too many people. Nobody wanted to use the black tags. It felt like giving up.

Christine wasn't afraid to use the black tag. Whether it was all the Section 31 training or a natural ability to detach her emotions from her work, she wasn't sure. She just knew that in the simulations that they ran, her team always had the best survival scores. Now it was time to start using that detachment.

"Ling, get over here and assist Dr McCoy," she yelled over the noise of the room. She grabbed three scared looking nurses and stationed them at the doors.

"Tag," she instructed, giving them bundles of coloured cards. "I'll be back to check your accuracy."

The doors to Sickbay opened and a new rush of patients staggered or were carried in.

"Go!" she ordered, and their training kicked in as they started to assess the needs of the people groaning in pain around them.

She did a quick sweep of the room, checking that all the nurses were accounted for and that they were all doing something practical. Some she assigned to assist the surgeons who were already operating, others she rounded up and started them prepping any red-tagged patient for treatment. She caught one or two performing treatments that technically only doctors were supposed to perform, but she said nothing. There weren't enough doctors left, and it was clear that they knew what they were doing. Later she'd get McCoy to backdate the orders for their treatment and get him to sign off on it.

If they survived until later.

She went back to the triage area, and started to help separate those who could be saved from those who couldn't.

Time passed in strange bursts of frantic activity and blood-sodden stillness. Just as soon as they got a handle on the casualties already in Sickbay and were cleaning up, another wave would come in. The last patient through the doors was their captain, and McCoy yelled for her to follow him into the sterile prep room.

The surgery was long and arduous, and wasn't helped by the fact that they were nearly sucked into a black hole during the middle of it. That was something that McCoy ranted about during the length of the operation to remove the Centaurian slug from Captain Pike's spine, and Christine really, really did not want to be in Jim Kirk's shoes when McCoy got his hands on him.

And then it was over; the ship was headed back to Earth, albeit at impulse speed. Captain Pike had made it through surgery and was starting the beginning of a gruelling recovery period. All the yellow and most of the red tagged patients had survived their injuries and were also recovering. Maintenance staff (and that meant anybody who could be pressed into service by the new Scottish chief engineer) were patching up the ship left, right and centre. Sickbay staff were on a rolling sleep schedule, as were the rest of the crew. Kirk was visible everywhere, meeting crew, supervising repairs, reassuring the wounded. He was followed by a dogged yeoman, a small blonde woman called Rand, who kept badgering him to complete paperwork and sign things as he moved. To McCoy's amusement, Kirk couldn't shake her throughout his Sickbay visit.

Rooms were being allocated to the crew, something that there just hadn't been time for in the rush beforehand. She insisted that McCoy sleep first as he was nearly dead on his feet and was only conscious due to stubbornness. He took a room as close to Sickbay as possible and made her swear that she'd wake him the second any of his patients needed him. She promised, and then threatened him with a sedative if he didn't leave Sickbay immediately. They were in the privacy of the CMO's small office, so there was nobody to watch him pull her in for a long hug, and a gentle kiss on the forehead.

"I'm glad you didn't die," he said eventually.

"I know," she sighed. "Same."

She knew that if she stayed in his arms for much longer she'd end up following him back to his room and crawling under the covers with him, so she reluctantly detached herself and shooed him on his way. He was back after a couple of hours – not long enough, in her opinion, for a real rest – and he sent her off to find a room. A harassed operations officer told her that they were having to double up due to the damage done to the accommodation decks, so nobody thought it strange that she used the room McCoy had just vacated. He had showered in the sonic unit, as she had, because the sheets were clean but they still smelled of him. She buried her nose in the covers, and fell quickly asleep.

Getting home took a long time. Starfleet Medical sent out emergency transport vehicles for the most seriously wounded patients, so they were able to off-load those able to travel. That relieved the pressure in Sickbay significantly, and meant that they were able to start dealing with the massive backlog of paperwork that followed each patient. The bulk of that fell on Christine's shoulders, as the other nurses provided care for the patients and got on with other necessary tasks. She would have preferred the patient care, or even the unenviable job of sorting through what remained of their stock cupboard, inventorying the remaining medicines and putting in a requisition order. However, her field promotion had been ratified by the new captain (actual words, as overheard by Christine outside McCoy's office: "Thank God you've got someone who can cope with your moods, Bones") and that meant she got a tiny office just off the nurses' station and a stack of PADDS about two metres high to wade through and complete in triplicate. She also got a reasonable shift rotation sorted out for the staff, and made sure that they all had housing on board. For some reason that she wasn't too willing to think about, she didn't get round to swapping her room, and she and McCoy shared it. They never needed the bed at the same time, thanks to the shifts she organised, and neither talked to the other about the situation.

She liked that the pillows smelled of him.

It was perhaps time to concede, she thought as she sat at the desk, that her relationship with McCoy had moved beyond "hook up partner" and even beyond the "friends with benefits" that it had moved into. They were friends – honest ones. Their flight simulation lessons had revealed his honest phobia of shuttlecraft, and she'd been surprised that he'd let her see how terrified he actually was of being in a shuttle. That unexpected honesty had touched her, and to distract him from his fears she'd talked. About anything and everything. Sooner or later she hit on a topic that interested him, and their discussions grew and grew. They'd spend as long in bed just talking as they did having sex, and it hadn't seen weird to her at the time.

She wasn't completely stupid. She knew that he wanted more from her than she allowed him to have, and she was the one that kept him away. He'd been an antidote to Roger when they first met, and if she'd been smarter then she wouldn't have encouraged him after that first night. But that was her problem, wasn't it? Diving in head first, regardless of the consequences. Allowing both her personal and professional life to be tied so closely in Roger had been a huge mistake. And then what had she done? Rushed into signing up for Starfleet, of all the things, so she could put hundreds of thousands of lightyears between herself and her embarrassing mistakes. Then, of course, to compound the problem, she'd allowed herself to be pulled into a shadowy and mysterious secret branch of Starfleet on the same night she propositioned McCoy.

For a clever person, she was fully capable of making very stupid decisions.

If she gave in and started something real with McCoy, wasn't she just making the same mistakes that she had with Roger? Tying her personal and professional lives together? What if they got back to Earth and they were separated, posted to different ships? Or worse, what if they weren't separated, were posted together and then decided to break up? She'd be stuck on board the same ship until she could get reassigned somewhere else.

She folded her arms on her desk and laid her head on them. This was all very confusing.

"You look defeated," a voice rumbled from the doorway.

She looked up to see McCoy blocking the entrance.

"There's so much," she said gesturing at the PADDs. "You think you're making a dent in it, but it's just the tip of the iceberg."

"I know how you feel," he said. "I'm escaping mine for a bit for lunch. You want to join me?"

"Yes," she said immediately.

"I could have asked if you wanted to run the sterilization checks on the bed pans, and you would have agreed," he joked.

"I'm saving that for when I finish one whole stack," she told him, standing and stretching. "It'll be a treat."

"I heard a rumour that the engineers have managed to get the food replication units running again," he told her as they told their replacements they were taking a break. "And that chocolate cake is on the menu."

"Don't tease me with the promise of chocolate, McCoy," she warned him. "If you get my hopes up and you can't deliver…"

They were in the turbolift now, heading down thirty decks to the main mess hall. He turned suddenly and advanced on her, pressing her into the wall of the life.

"When have I ever failed to deliver anything to you, Christine?" he asked, looking at her directly in the eyes.

"Never," she whispered, before pushing up on her toes and grabbing his face for a kiss. His arms came around her tightly, and thank God one of them had the sense to flail madly at the control panel and pause the lift, because their kiss seemed to go on for an eternity. They parted eventually, red-faced and panting.

"We can get that chocolate cake to go," she suggested.

"Good idea," he said, running his fingers through her hair in an attempt to smooth it. She laughed, and batted his hands away.

"Get us moving again," she told him. "Otherwise they're going to think something's happened in here."

"Something almost did," he replied, discreetly adjusting his trousers as he hit the release for the lift.

They did grab their lunches from the take-out counter in the mess, and there was chocolate cake, which they ended up eating later, in bed.

"If I believed in gods, I'd think chocolate was a gift from them," Christine said happily.

McCoy said nothing, but merely grinned at her.

"What?" she demanded.

"You have chocolate on your chin," he told her. "It's cute."

She yanked at the sheet to wipe her face, but McCoy protested.

"I've got to sleep on these too," he grumbled. "Here, I'll get it."

He leaned over and wiped her chin with his thumb. Christine darted forward and licked the blob of chocolate from it.

"I can't waste it," she explained, and he shook his head in fond exasperation. He kissed her again, and rested his forehead against hers.

"We need to talk," he said, his voice a low rumble.

"I know," she sighed, not quite able to look him in the eye. "Can it wait for a while, though?"

"Not too long," he warned, running his fingers down over her ear and across her jawline. "I can't wait for too long."

"I know," she repeated, her skin prickling in just the right way as he did it. "I just need to work through some stuff."

He sighed and lay back on the bed. "We've still got a few minutes," he said, looking at the clock on the bedside table. "Come here."

She went willingly to his arms, and they lay in silence until the seconds ticked away and duty called them both to Sickbay once more.

McCoy had to leave Sickbay not long after his lunch break for the daily staff meeting with all the heads of section. There they all reported to the captain about the state of the ship as they were responsible for its running. Lieutenant Commander Scott had taken the majority of time in these meetings for the last few days, as he and his team had the most work to do. McCoy listened with half an ear to most of Scott's report, and sent a message to Christine on his PADD warning her to expect more accidental injuries from repair teams to come in over the next few days. As the repair crews were made up of anybody who could reasonably be pressed into service, Sickbay had seen a lot of burns from welding kits and sparks from electrical explosions as well as trapped digits and other minor injuries. They weren't anything that Sickbay couldn't handle, but it was good to be prepared.

Once all the section heads had made their reports and recommendations, Kirk dismissed them all, including his yeoman, who had been taking notes and handling the flow of information with a professionalism that had impressed everyone involved in the meetings.

"Bones," Kirk said as he made to leave the room. "Can I have a word?"

"Captain?" asked Yeoman Rand hesitantly. "Do you need me to stay?"

"Private medical consultation," Kirk assured her. "Doctor-patient confidentiality."

"Of course," she said, frowning a little. "You have a conference call with the admiralty and the captains of the ships in the Laurentian system in fifteen minutes, Captain."

"Understood," he said. "Dismissed."

The yeoman left, and Kirk waited until the doors had hissed shut before he left out a relieved breath.

"That woman is like a fiend," he said, shaking his head. "I swear to god, she pencils in time on the schedule for me to take a…."

"What did you want me for, other than to complain about somebody doing their job?" McCoy asked. "I take it this isn't really a medical consultation? Your ribs are ok?"

"They're good," Kirk said dismissively. "I wanted to talk about you."

"Okay," McCoy said slowly.

"One of the many, _many_ forms that Rand has had me put my authorisation to over the last week has been the crew housing manifest," Kirk said slyly.

"Alright," McCoy said. "I don't see what I have to do with me."

"I couldn't help but notice that you and the lovely Christine are down as sharing the same cabin," Kirk said, advancing on his, wiggling his eyebrows. "Has your_ emfriendship/em_ turned into something a little more…em_intimate/em?"_

"Oh good God, you're out of your mind," McCoy sighed, trying not to blush and give the game away. "Most of the crew are sharing rooms, Jim. I'm just lucky it's only two of use in there. Some are four to a room."

"The phrase 'strange bedfellows' has never been more accurate," Kirk reflected. "I'm sharing with Spock, and that man is preternaturally tidy, Bones."

"If that's all, Captain," McCoy said, starting for the door.

"It is not all!" Kirk said indignantly. "You can't tell me you're not sleeping with her!"

"Jim, I can say with all honestly that Christine Chapel and I have never slept together," McCoy said with a breathtaking combination of precise accuracy and complete untruth. "And that I will swear on the grave of any dead relative you wish me to."

"Fine," Kirk said grumpily. "But what's stopping you, man? You're single, she's single, you're clearly compatible. She even laughs at your jokes, and God knows how rare that is in a woman."

"Hey," McCoy warned, pride knocked just a little.

"If it's a workplace thing, there isn't anything in the rules that says you can't have a relationship with her," Kirk pressed on. "You just have to declare it and run any promotions past a review board."

"It's complicated, Jim," McCoy said, in a strong enough tone to make Kirk back off, just a little. "I…," he sighed. "It's not an easy thing, me and her. There's a lot of baggage for both of us. Just back off and let us work through it at our own pace, okay?"

"I am there for you man," Kirk said solemnly, and McCoy groaned. He'd been on the receiving end of Kirk's 'help' on previous occasions, and on not one occasion had it ended well.

"I don't need any help," McCoy warned his friend as he gathered up his belongings and headed for the door.

"I'm your wingman, buddy!" Kirk called.

"I don't need a wingman!" McCoy yelled back over his shoulder as he made as hasty an exit as he could.

"I'm your coach! Your mentor!" Kirk called after him down the corridor.

"Stick with being my captain!" McCoy called back as he rounded the corner and could escape back to Sickbay. "Jim Kirk, my captain," he said in wonder as the turbolift arrived. "God help me."

Chapter Eleven

They made it back to Earth two days later, and after a debriefing that seemed to go on for weeks rather than the days it actually took, Christine was free to see her family and friends. There was a welcome home party for her, where everybody ate and drank far too much. Carol had managed to make it there, which was a pleasant surprise. Her ship had been in the Laurentian system, too far away to be any good at the Battle of Vulcan. She'd arrived home that day, and was spending her two-day leave with Christine.

As the party continued far into the night in the house below, Christine snuck upstairs to her old bedroom with Carol and a bottle of wine that her grandmother had made. It was potent stuff, and a few glasses left both women a little drunk.

"I was so worried about you," Carol said, topping up her glass. "When we heard what had happened we were at warp straight away, but we knew we wouldn't be in time to be of any help."

"It was awful," Christine said, sipping her own wine. "You go though the drills and the preparation, and they get the smoke and the confusion right, but they never get the smells right in the simulations. You know that? Simulations never get the smells."

"No, I suppose they don't," Carol said. "I hadn't really thought about it."

"The blood feels real on your hands in a sim, but you don't get that iron tang in your nostrils that you do when there's real blood. Or the sweat from the person you're dragging across the room to a biobed. Or the vomit, or the smell when someone's had their guts ripped open and…"

"Alright, I get the picture," Carol said, her pretty face wrinkling in disgust.

"They should get the smells right," Christine said. "You don't expect the smells."

"You're pretty drunk," Carol told her.

"Not drunk enough," Christine said, reaching for the bottle and pouring the rest of it in her glass. "Not to forget the smells."

A half remembered nugget of information surfaced in her brain.

"You worked on the holosuite designs, didn't you?" she said.

"My father let me play with the specs," Carol said, shrugging. "I wasn't on the team that created them or anything."

"You should tell him to get the smells right," she said. "It's important."

Carol shrugged. "It's not really his area," she explained. "He's in starship development."

Christine almost snorted into her wine, but she controlled herself.

"Are you going to ship back out when the _Enterprise_ has finished repairs?" Carol asked.

"Yes," Christine said. "At least, I assume so. They're not going to keep me as Head Nurse now, but I would have thought I'd get a posting there."

"Who said you won't get Head Nurse?" Carol asked indignantly.

"I'm barely qualified," Christine explained. "There are people in the Fleet who've been doing the job for years, and deserve the promotion to the flagship. They're not going to give it to me."

"Who's the CMO?" Carol asked.

Christine shrugged. "If Jim Kirk keeps the captaincy, like all the rumours are saying, then I think that he'll keep McCoy on. They're best friends, and McCoy got the Centaurian slug out of Pike without killing him or permanently crippling him. No way that he'd be replaced."

"Is he the one you've been having all the sex with?"

"I haven't been having_ emall/em_ the sex with him," Christine said, after taking a healthy gulp of wine.

"Have you been having sex with anybody else?" Carol asked, ruthlessly practical despite being inebriated.

"No," Christine admitted.

"Has he?"

"I don't know," Christine said. After a pointed look from Carol she sighed and added, "Probably not."

"Do you think he wouldn't hire you because you're sleeping together?" Carol asked.

"No, but I don't think he'd offer me Head Nurse when there are other, better qualified people out there," Christine said, draining her glass. "He's a professional, Carol. He'll do what's best for the ship, and that's having the best qualified staff."

"How very grown up of you," Carol said dryly.

"Someone had to be," Christine said. "Come on. I'm not drunk enough yet."

"More wine," agreed Carol.

Going back to the Academy after her leave was hard; so many people were gone. Classmates from her nursing course had been lost, those that had been assigned to the _Farragut_ and other ships in the fleet. She felt the loss in other ways too; corridors didn't seem as full any more, and the mess hall and common rooms weren't as crowded. Bodies were missing.

The day after the announcement of Captain Pike's promotion to admiral, and Jim Kirk's promotion to captain, Christine was called to Admiral Marcus' office. The same Andorian yeoman was on duty in the outer room, and once again she was made to wait until the admiral deigned to see her. She was waved into one of the bucket chairs, and she forced herself to sit calmly and not fidget as he finished reading the PADD in front of him.

"Chapel," he said eventually. "I'm just reading the report of your performance on the _Enterprise_. It's positively glowing."

"Thank you, sir," she said evenly. She'd read it already – innate nosiness combined with Section 31-approved tuition in computer skills meant that she knew how McCoy had praised her performance under fire and her cool and calm demeanour as she managed the triage of the injured personnel.

"Is it so good because you're sleeping with the man who wrote it?" the admiral challenged. Christine didn't flinch.

"No sir, it's good because I performed well. If you think that Leonard McCoy would falsify a report because of our personal situation, then you just don't know him very well, sir."

"He's an honest man?" the admiral asked.

Christine nodded her head once.

"And how would your honest man react if he knew that you'd been lying to him for three years?" the admiral went on.

"I don't know, sir," Christine said, her anger beginning to rise. She tried to keep a tight lid on it. "But as he's never going to find out, I really don't think it's going to be an issue."

The admiral stared at her for a while, then returned his attention to the PADD in front of him.

"He's requested you for assignment to the _Enterprise_," he said.

Christine said nothing. That information she'd been able to find out too.

"But not as Head Nurse," the admiral went on. "He's gone with a Lieutenant Callis for that position."

Christine stayed silent. That had been on the report she'd read as well. McCoy had praised her abilities, but had written that he'd need somebody with a few years seniority over the rest of his staff, which Callis had. Chapel, although very good at her job, was a product of the same class of cadets that made up the majority of the nursing staff and he felt that he needed somebody with more experience.

Christine couldn't argue with him, as his reasoning was eminently logical. Of course, part of her wanted the Head Nurse job, but she understood why Lieutenant Callis was being offered it. Although not far off in age, Callis had trained as a nurse from the beginning and had racked up nearly ten years worth of experience in various ships and starbases. He was the obvious choice for a plum job like this aboard the _Enterprise_.

"Have you anything to say about this turn of events, Chapel?" the admiral pressed.

"No sir," Christine replied. "Doctor McCoy has made a logical and well thought out decision."

"He's your lover," the admiral challenged.

"He's also the chief medical officer of the ship," Christine said calmly. "He has a responsibility to the captain and crew, and that includes hiring the correct staff."

"You really mean that, don't you?" the admiral said after a moment's careful scrutiny of her face.

"Micro expressions don't lie, Admiral," Christine told him.

The admiral shook his head in disbelief. "We were right on the money with you, weren't we, Chapel?" he asked.

Christine said nothing. He was right. Whatever answers she had given to the testers back in her first year had marked her out as a potential Section 31 agent, and she had learned well from all of her teachers. She'd always had the ability to compartmentalise her feelings, and that ability had served her well.

"Don't worry about the McCoy thing anyway," the admiral said. "You're not going to the em_Enterprise/em_."

"I'm not?" Christine asked, genuinely startled at the news.

"No," the admiral told her. "The whole em_Narada/em_ incident has cost us significantly, Section 31 included. We lost too many agents who were serving on ships lost at the Battle of Vulcan. We need to deploy you on your first mission for Section 31, in defence of Starfleet and the Federation."

Christine blinked, shocked at the admiral's words. Although she'd received a lot of training in the three years that she'd been with Starfleet, she never really thought that she'd be activated as an agent. All of her meetings with the psychologist had been about concealing her training and coping with lying to her friends and loved ones for years at a time because Section 31 agents were used so rarely. Of course, the decimation of the Fleet had shown itself in many ways, and she shouldn't have been surprised that Section 31 would have been hit too.

A viewscreen turned on, and Christine turned to face a map of the border between the space belonging to the Federation, and that belonging to the Romulan Empire. The Neutral Zone was marked in stark red against the blackness of the map, but the map also highlighted a string of planets that ran closely along the edge of the border on the Federation side.

"What do you know about the planets highlighted on the map, Chapel?" the admiral asked.

"They're known as the Outer Territories, sir," she said, frowning as she took in the information detailed on the map. "Frontier planets, class K, L or M with no sapient species, populated by a variety of settlers from all over the Federation. The planets are rich in important minerals, such as dilithium. Conditions vary on the planets, but none have significant settlements. Most of the settlers are miners who work a claim for a while, sell their product and retire rich, selling on their claim."

"Good," the admiral said approvingly. "The Outer Territories are largely self-sufficient, but are dependent on Starfleet for shipping various commodities that can't be found on the planets themselves. Little bits of luxuries and home comforts. We also provide medical staff and engineering expertise as part of a trade agreement – in exchange, we have first refusal on all minerals mined on the planets."

"I'm to be sent as medical support to one of the planets?" Christine asked.

"That will be your cover, yes," the admiral said. "In reality, Section 31 is extremely concerned about the location of the Territories so close to the Romulan border. Long-range scans from our base in the Territories have suggested that the Romulans are heavily mining mineral-rich moons just inside their borders. Those minerals are on the verge of running out, and the Territories are very close to the edge of the Neutral Zone."

"You think there could be a Romulan incursion there?" Christine asked, peering at the map. The Neutral Zone didn't look that big.

"We are certain that Romulan spies have been sent to the largest dilithium producing planet, here," the admiral told her, expanding the map so that a small planet close to the border was magnified. "Genetically altered, of course, to pass for human. We need you to go there and take over the settlement's medical facility. Screen all the inhabitants for genetic alterations and identify the spies. You'll send the information back to us, and we'll do the rest."

"How?" Christine asked, frowning. "You'll be a long way away, and the whole settlement requiring medical testing will warn the spies that something's up."

"We have a research and design facility located underneath the town's main settlement," the admiral said, after a pause. "Agents assigned there will take care of removing the spies. Your cover as a Starfleet nurse will remain intact. Starfleet rotate the staff assigned there on a regular basis – two years, I think. You'll do a full rotation and then we'll assign you somewhere else. No suspicion will fall on you, although you may have to get creative to get a genetic reading on all of the settlers."

"Will I have any assistance?" Christine asked, her mind racing at the scale of the task ahead of her.

"You will have a contact with the base, but for the majority of the time, you'll be acting alone," the admiral warned her. "You think you can cope with that, Chapel?"

"Yes sir," she said immediately.

"Good," he said gruffly. "This is an easy assignment, Chapel. No terminations required, just genetic analysis. Our R and D section has created a few little toys for you. They look like standard field equipment, but they're actually very advanced technology. It'll be like having the full power of Starfleet Medical in your hand."

"When do I leave?" she asked.

"Tonight," the admiral told her. "You're being taken to Starbase Seven on board the em_Valiant/em_, and from there you'll be picked up by one of the ships that do the run from the Outer Territories. Total travel time is about three weeks, so we're just hoping the Romulans aren't further along than we think they are, otherwise you'll be arriving to find an imperial warbird in orbit around the planet."

"Yes sir," she said, swallowing hard. A few hours wasn't going to be long enough to say goodbye to everybody.

"Non-classified details will be sent to your PADD by seventeen hundred hours," the admiral told her. "Good luck, Ensign Chapel. Dismissed."

Christine rose and saluted, and left.

McCoy had been commissioned as a lieutenant commander, because of his promotion to Chief Medical Officer. The _Enterprise_ was in spacedock being fixed properly, and all the section heads apart from engineering had been given small offices in the administration block of Starfleet Headquarters to try and organise the staffing of their departments. His name and rank were embossed on a little plaque next to the door, and for a moment Christine had difficulty thinking of him as Lieutenant Commander L. McCoy, M.D, CMO em_Enterprise/em_. He was the gruff and unsure man she'd coaxed out of a crowded club, who'd thrown her into the cold ocean after their second outdoor encounter. He was the man who'd got her safely home after she'd tried to drink away bad memories and he was the one who had repaired the damage that Roger had done.

He was the man she'd fallen in love with, she realised, and now she was going to have to tell him goodbye. It wasn't fair to ask him to wait for her to come back, especially considering that, Marcus' assurances to one side, she could very well die executing her mission. She didn't think that Romulan spies were particularly merciful.

She pressed the buzzer, and heard his yell of "Come in!" through the doors that were supposed to be soundproofed.

He looked up as the doors opened, and smiled at her.

"Christine!" he said, getting up and moving piles of bureaucracy out of the way. "Come and sit down."

"Thanks," she said, looking around at the small, grey room. "Love what you've done with the place."

"Oh don't you start," he said tiredly. "It's only temporary. Jim wanted me to get the walls painted. I told him I don't intend to be here long enough to care about what colour it is."

"I bet his office is pretty fancy," Christine said, taking in the piles of paperwork, the PADDs stacking up, and the remnant of a replicated meal in the corner of the room.

"He's got a window," McCoy shrugged.

A pause followed his words. He fiddled with the PADD on his desk, before taking a deep breath and plunging into his next sentence.

"I've asked for you to be assigned to the _Enterprise,_" he said quickly. "But I've had to recommend somebody else for Head Nurse."

"I know, Len," she said gently.

"It's not that I don't want you," he ploughed on. "It's just that the Admiralty want somebody with a bit more experience for a leadership role and..."

"It's okay," she said firmly. "I understand, and I agree. If I was in your position, I'd do exactly the same thing."

"You would?" he asked suspiciously.

"I would," she assured him, leaning forward across his desk to take his hand. "Your nursing staff is going to be predominantly this year's cadet class. You need someone with a few years experience under their belt."

"You could do the job," he said after a few moments. "I know you've got it in you."

"And one day, I will," she told him. "Just not yet."

She sighed, and held his hand a little tighter.

"I won't be coming with you on the em_Enterprise/em_, Len," she said. "I've already been assigned somewhere else."

"Where?" he demanded, pulling back.

"The Outer Territories," she told him.

"It's the back of fucking beyond!" he said indignantly.

Christine shrugged. "I have to go where they tell me to go," she said gently. "Your glowing review of my performance on the em_Enterprise/em_ must have caught the attention of somebody higher up. I'm going to the Territories to serve as part of the medical team that rotates through there."

"No you're not," he said determinedly. "I'll get Jim to pull rank and demand you're assigned to the em_Enterprise/em_, I'll..."

"It won't do any good," she said calmly. "I've received my orders and I'm shipping out tonight. I'll be gone for two years."

"No," he said again, looking stricken.

"Yes," she said, tears beginning to fall.

He rounded the desk and caught her up in his arms, holding her tightly against his body.

"I don't want you to go," he said, emotion colouring his voice.

"I don't want to go," she admitted, crushed against his chest. "But I have to."

They stood there for a long time, before they realised that the door was lockable, and this was probably going to be the last time they saw each other for a while. He lifted her with one arm, and used the other arm to push a pile of paperwork off the desk and onto the floor. At any other time she would have laughed at the absurdity of the gesture, but right then all she cared about was getting her skin pressed against his. The love they made on the desk was frantic and fast, leaving scratches and bruises behind. Later, on the floor, it was slower, more gentle. More loving.

"I suppose you realise that I love you," he said gruffly. They were laying together on the floor, and her head was pillowed on his arm.

She didn't say anything. She tightened her hold on him.

"I know that wasn't supposed to happen," he went on. "But it did, so you're just going to have to live with it."

She pressed her face into his shoulder, and didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"Two years isn't that long," he went on. "There'll be leaves. And when you finish your assignment, there'll be a place for you on the em_Enterprise/em_. With me. If you want it," he finished, and his whole body tensed up.

Gently, she pulled herself out of his arms and kissed him.

"I want it now," she said. "And I want you now. But two years is a long time. You may find that you've moved on by then. I don't want you to make promises that you won't be able to keep, because you'll tear yourself to pieces. I know you, Leonard McCoy, and it would."

"Do you love me?" he asked.

"God Len, this isn't about that," she sighed.

"Do you love me?" he repeated.

"This wasn't supposed to be about love," she said, turning away so he wouldn't see the tears start to form in her eyes. She rummaged about for her clothes, and started to put them back on.

"I know what this was supposed to be, and I know what it actually is," he said, his voice starting to raise. "Just answer the damn question Christine, do you love me?"

"Of course I love you, you fucking idiot!" she yelled. "Why the hell do you think that this is so hard for me to do?"

He rose and hauled her in for another demanding kiss.

"So if I love you and you love me," he asked, his forehead resting against hers, his hands on her shoulders, "why the hell are you pushing me away?"

"I'm going to be gone for a long time," she said, running her hands along his arms. "Anything can happen. I don't want you wasting your life waiting around for me. You're a good man. You deserve somebody in your life that won't be hundreds of thousands of light years away."

"I want you," he muttered.

"Well, you can't have me," Christine said, eyes bright with tears. "And I'm not going to be responsible for making your life miserable for the next two years."

"You don't think I'm going to be miserable without you anyway?"

"I think you'll mope for a bit," Christine said, aiming for a cheerful tone. "And then, if you're lucky, you'll meet some pretty young thing who won't lead you a song and a dance."

"Not going to happen, darlin'," he said sadly. "I know the signs. It's you, and that's the end of it."

"I don't want you to wait for me," she told him. "You're a free man, McCoy."

She pulled out of his arms and dressed in silence. He picked up his own clothes and dressed too.

"Goodbye, Len," she said, once he was presentable again. "You're going to be a great CMO. I wish I was going to be with you."

"In two years, you will be," he said simply. He walked towards her, and kissed her gently. "I don't believe for one minute that you want me to find somebody else. That's just you trying to run away from feeling things.

"I am not..." she began, but he clapped his large hand over her mouth to shush her.

"When I met you, you were hurting," he said simply. "I was somebody you used to get your confidence back, and don't get upset with me," he warned her, "because that's what you were to me too. We were damaged, Christine, and we fixed each other. Then it got deeper, and you kept me at arm's length because that scared you and I was too scared of losing you to risk doing anything about it. Now I get you to admit that you love me, and you think I'm going to let a few years get in the way of that?"

Christine swallowed, a little stunned at the force of his words.

"I don't want to let you go, Christine, but I don't get to make all the rules around here. So you can say goodbye and walk out of this door," he warned, "but I'm going to be waiting for you to walk back in when your time in the boondocks is up. You don't get to tell me how I feel about you, and you don't get to tell me when it's time for me to stop."

He let go of her mouth and stepped away from her.

"I...I can't promise that I'm going to walk through that door," she said.

"Then I'm just going to have to hope that you do," he said, with a finality that both crushed and uplifted her.

He gave her one last kiss and stepped away.

"Goodbye Christine," he said. "I'll see you in two years."

"Goodbye, Len," she said, hesitated, then turned and walked away.

Chapter Twelve

Christine had been born and raised on Earth, and had never dreamed of living on a frontier planet. Arriving at Lintellia, the main dilithium producing planet and home of the secret Section 31 base, had really opened her eyes to how pioneers lived.

The only building with any level of modern technology was the dilithium ore processing plant, which had to have the very latest machinery to keep production levels at a competitive rate when compared to other plants. Starfleet had been responsible for building that, and no expense or technological update had been spared. The rest of the town was built from a strange mixture of natural wood and stone, hastily built by teams of builders who used local materials to create basic accommodations. These were considered the better houses; others still lived in pre-fabricated settlement pods which were essentially sturdy tents. They were waterproof and had good insulation, but they were used mainly by those workers who bought a claim, mined it quickly and moved on. Those that came to Lintellia to live permanently and raise families tended to live in a permanent house, once they had mined enough ore to afford to build one.

The houses lacked what Christine would consider the basic technology – climate control, automatic dust and dirt disposal, food replication units and laundry units that cleaned, dried and pressed clothes. They had indoor plumbing, but septic tanks sat under each house's yard. They had food refrigeration and freezing, but no automatic dishwashers. Those that stayed at home to look after the children had their work cut out for them; it was as bad as living in the twentieth century.

There was a small school that catered for children of all ages, with extra lessons being taken by subspace by the older children who needed specialised teaching. The settlement had a bar and an entertainment centre, where movies would be shown and parties held. There was a shop that got stocked once every six weeks on the supply run, and you could get post delivered there if you were willing to wait the months it could take to get to you.

Christine worked at the small medical centre in the settlement, and lived in a Starfleet pre-fabrication pod that all nurses assigned to the settlement were given when they arrived. Basic was clearly Starfleet's watchword; there was a bedroom, a bathroom and a combination cooking and dining area. The furniture was the same drab grey as the walls, and none of it was comfortable.

The medical centre had a nurse and a doctor, who was shared between three or four settlements on three or four planets. There was no beaming technology in the settlement, so the doctor used a Starfleet shuttlecraft to make the short hops between planets. Those Academy flight lessons suddenly seemed to Christine to be very important after all.

Technically, both she and Dr Ramirez worked one eight hour shift five days a week and had the sixth day free, but in reality they were both always on duty. If someone urgently banged on your door in the middle of the night and told you that someone had nearly severed his leg with a plasma cutter, you didn't tell him to come back in six hours.

Such emergencies weren't common, and Christine spent most of her day with basic nursing chores – monitoring medication for patients, conducting routine tests and dealing with the small everyday injuries people got – sprained ankles and strained backs. She had a few expectant mothers, including one of the miners, and kept a careful eye on their progress. Children needed their shots and harassed parents needed a kind person to talk to.

She got on with the doctor well enough, but she was nearing the end of her two year rotation and was obsessed with leaving the place. Christine knew she had two years to go before she was free of it, and tried not to let the thought depress her. She had an important job, and she needed to complete it as soon as possible.

It took time, though; she didn't have the authority to command every person in the town to turn up to her clinic, and she didn't fancy her chances at fighting burly miners to the ground and forcing them to give her blood samples.

The children were easy to get samples from. It was incredibly unlikely that they'd be spies anyway, given their ages, but everyone had to be cleared. Luckily, the children all needed vaccinations, so Christine was able to use her fancy new equipment to take a genetic sample as she immunised the children and chatted with their parents.

Most of the parents had missed a shot or two in their lifetimes, so Christine offered them a booster while they were escorting their children. Most readily agreed, and some even volunteered to show their dubious children that getting an injection wasn't a big deal. Their willingness made them unlikely spies, who would be wary of any unnecessary medical treatment, but Christine ran their samples through her computer back in her pre-fab pod each night anyway. Each time, the computer told her that the settlers were exactly what they claimed to be. Mostly human, with some Tellerite, Caitian and one or two other species. Thankfully, none of the settlers were Betazoid or from any other race with empathic abilities. Christine had been the recipient of some training with the psychologist and her team in suppressing emotion, but not really enough. That should have come in her fourth year of training, which was actually her first year of service.

She took her opportunities when she found them. Whenever somebody came in for an injury or to refill their medication, she managed to take a sample. When she got called up to the ore processing plant because somebody had hurt themselves too badly to be moved, she sampled the victim and anybody else she could spot with an injury, no matter how small. Never a shrinking violet at the best of times, Christine found new reserves of forcefulness and authority when corralling men who wanted to ignore burns and cuts and go back to work.

Night after night, the small computer in her pod spat out negative results. No Romulan spies found. After a few months of living in the settlement, she'd managed to survey about sixty percent of the population and she'd found nothing.

Her Section 31 contact had remained anonymous, as her coded message from Admiral Marcus that she'd picked up at Starbase Seven had told her they would. The message said that they'd make contact when Section 31 required an update on her progress, and in an emergency she could rely on her contact to aid her as best they could.

The night the contact revealed themselves to Christine there was a party at the entertainment centre in the town. The orbit of the planet created a six-day week and no real change in seasons, but all the cultures represented in the settlement had some kind of seasonal celebration back on their homeworld. There had been an agreement that there'd be a shared party in honour of whatever they were missing at home, and just about everybody crammed themselves into the entertainment space and the bar next door. The party spilled out into the scrubby ground outside the buildings, and there were bonfires and barbeques and fake snowmen and Christmas trees all mixed haphazardly alongside other, more alien, celebrations.

Christine had joined in with enthusiasm, and had spent most of the day helping to create paper chains to loop around trees that had been cut down and dragged into the centre for decoration. Now she had a glass of something that in no way resembled eggnog but had a very hefty alcoholic kick to it, and was finding out just how popular a single woman on a settlement made up largely of single men could be.

She'd let McCoy go, because she knew that asking him to wait two years for her wasn't fair, but it didn't mean that she'd stopped loving him. It had taken her long enough to admit it, and now that she had, she just couldn't think of anybody else. Part of her hoped that he'd make the sensible decision and move on. She'd been nothing but trouble for him really, keeping him at arms length and dodging all of his attempts at creating something real between them. He deserved somebody better, somebody who wouldn't have to lie about herself all the time.

Part of her hoped that he didn't forget her, that he kept on loving her. It was selfish and wrong of her, but she didn't care. Her secret dream was to do her duty, be reassigned to the _Enterprise_ and fall off the radar of Section 31, never to be reactivated again. Then they could be together and actually try to turn their relationship into something more than just unbelievably good sex.

So that was why she had dodged her way out of another welcoming group of drunken miners and ducked outside for a bit. She wandered through the outside decorations, nodding to a few people she'd met and picking up another glass of not-nog from a small bar that had been set up. A loud clang of bells announced that it was time for all the children of the settlement to receive presents, something that the human children expected from Father Christmas, and the non-human children demanded to be included in.

Most of the settlers wandered off to watch the present-giving, but Christine decided to stay outside on a bench near one of the bonfires. She'd stuffed some hastily bodged together 'stockings' – surgical support bandages sewn together at one end – with some sweets she had ordered from the last supply run and had left them with the pile of presents for the children inside the entertainment room. Just about everybody had donated something for the kids, and there would be some very happy young people going home in a few hours.

"Not going to watch the little darlings opening their presents?"

The voice came out of the gloom and surprised Christine, who thought she was alone.

"No," she said. "Too crowded and noisy."

Her mystery speaker moved forward into the light, revealing a man she'd never seen before. He was dressed, like everybody else, in his 'best' clothes, clothes that were reserved for parties and not for everyday working. He was of average height and had tanned skin and dirty-blond hair, but he was pretty non-descript. If pressed, Christine wouldn't be able to describe any distinguishing feature. He was the most average man she'd ever met.

"I don't think I know you," she said politely. "I'm Christine Chapel, the Starfleet nurse."

"I'm Jeff Barnaby, one of the engineers at the ore processing plant. Lieutenant Barnaby, to be precise, but don't stand, Ensign Chapel," he said, as she started to rise. "We're off-duty here."

"I thought that I had met all the Starfleet personnel here," Christine said, frowning as she reviewed her mental list of known Starfleet officers and enlisted men. "I asked all Starfleet to report to me for compulsory health checks four weeks ago."

"Ah," said the man quietly, sitting next to her. "But like you, I have a different mission here. To everybody here I'm a private contractor, hired by Starfleet to help run the plant. They don't know I'm Starfleet."

Christine stiffened. This was her Section 31 contact?

"That's right," he said softly. "Admiral Marcus assigned me as your contact. He wants your preliminary findings. I'll send them through our subspace communication array."

"Everything's on the computer in my pod," Christine said softly.

"Let's take a walk," he suggested. "You can give the data to me to send, and fill me in on your progress on the way."

The streets of the settlement were empty. It was the perfect time to make contact, Christine thought. If anybody did see them together, they'd assume that they were making the most of the alcohol and the evening and sneaking off for some private fun.

Not this man, Christine thought, looking sideways at him as they made the way to her pod. Thoroughly unremarkable in every way, which was probably what made him very good at his job. She'd had enough of unremarkable men, though.

They entered the pod and he looked around in distaste at the basic level of decoration as she accessed the computer terminal and started the long safety protocols that allowed her to access the information.

"The things we do for our Federation," he said, poking the uncomfortable couch dubiously.

"It's better than some assignments," she shrugged, downloading her data onto a chip. "There's not really anything to report. I've managed to survey just over sixty percent of the population, and none of them show any signs of genetic manipulation."

"That's what Marcus is looking for?" Barnaby asked intently.

"That's what they think is happening," Christine said. "But so far I don't see any evidence of it. I think it would be one or more of the miners, if it is happening. None of the miners with families show any evidence of not being exactly who they say they are, so I need to get access to the single men. But none of them are too keen to stop working and get their injuries seen to. They'd rather patch themselves up and keep on working."

"They are all about their profits," Barnaby said, nodding his head in agreement. "There are other ways to get genetic samples other than by getting them into your medical centre. You are single, right?"

"Yes," said Christine, feeling as though she was lying. "Although I really don't think that fucking my way through the miners is the right way to be getting genetic data from them."

"It's the easiest way," Barnaby said, shrugging. "It's not like they're going to turn you down."

"I'll keep it for a last resort," Christine said firmly.

He accepted the data chip and left, leaving Christine to ponder the problem of the rest of the miners. Sleeping her way through them was not an option she cared to countenance – who knew how many STIs there could be lurking amongst them. Although, she pondered, that could be a way in to the group, if she was willing to be less than ethical about her actions.

She was a spy. Ethics didn't always apply.

It took her a few days to get her calculations right, another day to synthesise the compound, and another two to work out the computer code necessary to alter a Starfleet issue replicator's programming. The next day in the medical centre, she pulled up a list of miners who were registered with the settlement and tallied it with her list of those she'd already had the chance to sample. All of the men were listed as single, and they were all between the ages of twenty and forty. Mining was a young man's game, it seemed.

She went up to the ore processing plant at lunchtime, with a bag full of medicine. One of the engineers, a Starfleet officer, had a little boy who required daily doses of a drug that helped regulate his heartbeat. Surgery was only an option when he was older, so he needed the drug to stay healthy. The medical centre had an abundance of the medicine, and Christine decided to deliver his next week's batch to his mother in person rather than drop it off at their home.

"You didn't have to go to this trouble, Ensign," the mother said when she turned up. "Danny's still got a few days' worth at home. Tom could have picked this up later in the week with the kids."

"I was due a visit here anyway," Christine lied. "I know that a lot of miners haven't had their health checks, and sooner or later most of them come through here with their ore. I'd hoped to catch some."

"They usually drop by at the end of the day," the engineer said, checking the medicine carefully. "Although there are probably some around the place now. You're welcome to wait in the break room. They all go there to get a cup of coffee while we weigh in their ore and calculate their payment. There's probably a utility room somewhere you could use if they want privacy."

"Thank you," Christine said gratefully. "Is there a replicator in the break room?"

"Food only, but if you're looking for chocolate, go nuts," the engineer told her. "It's another three weeks until the supply ship gets here, and the replicator is better than nothing."

"I didn't realise how much I took living on Earth for granted!" Christine said, smiling, and the engineer thanked her again for the medicine before directing her to the break room. Luckily it was empty, so there was nobody to see her attach the Section 31 blocker to the wall. The device, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, disrupted camera and microphone signals. She deliberately walked in front of the camera as she fussed with a table and chairs, and set up her diagnostic equipment. She allowed the camera to record footage of her intent on her PADD, then she triggered the remote commands to the blocker that disrupted the cameras. Anyone watching them on a security feed would just see her working at her PADD in an empty room. It would only work for a few minutes, so she had to move quickly.

The housing of the replicator came off neatly, revealing the maintenance panel underneath. Technicians had to be able to tinker with the machine's delicate coding as replicators were notorious for falling victim to electrical shorts and other problems. They were lifesavers on board starships and on bases far away from regular supply routes, but they were also probably the most hated piece of equipment for maintenance issues.

Christine was able to override the unit's security system, as this had been one of the very tasks that her computer teacher at Section 31 had been able to make sure she could do. Once she had access to the system she programmed in a very specific set of instructions that added a tasteless compound to every item of food and drink that the replicator produced. She was proud of the compound – it was her own special invention. It was carefully created to create a harmless but itchy skin rash in human males, while being harmless to human females. She was working on the assumption that engineering a Romulan to look like a human was easier than getting them to look like a Tellerite, of which there was only one that she hadn't been able to sample.

She was in and out of the replicator housing in just under four minutes, and was sitting back at her PADD when the blocker switched back to a live feed for the security cameras. She stayed for a few hours and caught a few miners who ambled in for a coffee, and she was able to persuade them to stay long enough for a quick scan with her tricorder. They all checked out, so she went back to the medical centre and began preparing for the influx of patients she knew she would receive. She also sent a message to the inboxes of all the miners so far untested, delicately reminding them that STI testing was a good idea as untreated minor symptoms, such as, say, skin rashes, could lead to much nastier complications later.

A lot of the miners had recently taken shuttles to a nearby planet for some "R and R"; the whole settlement knew that a legal brothel had been set up there, so it wasn't surprising that most of the single men, trapped in a town with very few available people, made use of the workers there. All the sex workers were scrupulously monitored for their health and wellbeing, Christine knew, and she felt a little guilty for implying blame on their behalf.

Over the next few weeks, just about all of the single miners showed up at her clinic with a variant of the rash. It was easily treated with topical cream, but Christine replicated some placebo tablets that were very similar to the standard STI treatment regimen for the men to take as well. She gave a lecture on sexual health as she took genetic sample from the miners, who took it in good stead. A quick glance at their medical history showed that this was not a new experience for most of them, and the nature of their "illness" made it unlikely they'd talk about it with anybody. Thanking human nature for its weird hang-ups, Christine ran the samples through her computer and came up with absolutely nothing.

She'd now surveyed all but two members of the settlement and she'd found nobody that showed any signs of genetic manipulation. She returned to the ore processing plant and reprogrammed the replicator, as she didn't want an influx of panicked miners with a rash that wouldn't go away. In the weird sort of luck that hits you sometimes, she was onsite when the red alert sirens went off and an explosion rocked the building. She ran from the room towards where smoke seemed to be pouring from a door that had been blasted open. She was stopped by one of the Starfleet engineers.

"The explosion causes toxic gas to be vented," he told her, hustling her back down the corridor. "We need to evacuate."

"I have my medical kit," she told him. "I can help."

"Set up outside and call for Dr Ramirez," he instructed, and just about threw her out of the building into the fresh air. Christine got the doctor on her communicator, and reported the explosion. Once that was done and the doctor was on her way, she began organising the miners and Starfleet personnel milling about the outside of the building in confusion.

There were cuts and bruises and smoke inhalation to deal with, all of which she could manage with the contents of her med kit that she'd brought with her as cover. Pretty soon the real injuries began to come out of the building, and all she could do was stabilise those affected by the toxic gas until Dr Ramirez arrived with the medi-shuttle and the required equipment. Civilians and unaffected Starfleet personnel with basic medical field training took over the minor injuries while Christine and the doctor worked on the more serious cases.

News of the explosion soon spread, and lots of people turned up to see if they could help, or to check on friends and family. The only other doctor in the system was told about the explosion and he managed to get there in twenty minutes, pushing his medi-shuttle to its limits. Together they were able to help save four of the five people who had been most severely affected by the toxic gas. They lost one person, who was one of the two people left unsampled on Christine's list. She got a sample anyway, for analysis later. The other unsampled miner was at the plant, and by insisting that he was checked out despite his protests that he hadn't been in the building, Christine finally managed to get all of the settlement's population.

It took her some days to get a chance to run the analysis as she had to deal with all the non-serious injuries caused by the accident. The two doctors had sent a distress call and were taking the very badly injured patients to rendezvous with the nearest ship who could transport them to a starbase, leaving Christine stranded on the planet to take charge of the settlement's medical issues. Just to add another layer of crisis to her life, not one but two of the pregnant women went into labour within days of each other. Thankfully their pregnancies had been text-book, and both babies were kind enough to engage in the correct position and not get their cords tied around their necks. Dr Ramirez was just within distance for a video feed, and she coached both parents and nurse through the delivery. Christine had assisted at several births, but she had never delivered a baby before. Now she had two under her belt.

"Only one more, and you fulfil the requirement for medical school," Ramirez told her over a fuzzy and static-y video connection. "All you need is three and you're free to specialise wherever you want."

"Two down, one to go," Christine joked, then left to check on the new arrivals to the settlement before registering their births on the official documentation. Strictly speaking, that wasn't her job, but there wasn't a town registrar here so she did the job.

She worked far past her hours that day, and groaned with relief as she was able to lie on her uncomfortable bed. Then she caught sight of the computer in the corner of the room and groaned. The last results of the sampling had to be analysed and sent to Admiral Marcus via Lieutenant Barnaby.

That thought made her pause. She hadn't sampled Barnaby.

Admiral Marcus had been quite clear – somebody in the settlement was spying for the Romulans. She'd gone through all the civilians and the Starfleet personnel, and nobody had been anything other than what they claimed to be. But she hadn't sampled Barnaby – she'd just assumed that because he was Section 31, he didn't need to be tested. He wasn't the only member of Section 31 here, either. This location hid a Section 31 research and development base. There had to be other people on the planet that didn't show up on the settlement lists.

She sat up in horror. If there was a spy here, he or she had to be a member of Section 31. That meant a double agent, one that had successfully passed themselves off as human long enough to fool Section 31 into recruiting them.

She had to test Barnaby. If his test came back negative she could voice her suspicions to him about the rest of the concealed team. If his test was positive, she knew that he was the spy.

Her stomach turned. How was she going to get a genetic sample from Barnaby? He was too clever to fall for the replicator trick, and he'd never turned up for his basic health screening. She paced back and forth as she considered her options. Whatever happened, she had to get a message back to Section 31. They had to know that the only possible Romulan spy had to be a member of their organisation, but the only way to get the message was through Barnaby himself.

She remembered his conversation, about getting genetic samples from the miners through sex, and sighed. Unless she were to drug him and get the sample, it seemed the only way. Analysis took days, after all. She couldn't keep him unconscious for that length of time without somebody noticing his absence, and if he were really Romulan she had no idea how basic sedatives would work on him.

Grimacing, she set to work on encoding a message to sit amongst the data on the settlement's population. Although her surface message informed the admiral that there were no Romulan spies on Lintellia, the message underneath was an urgent warning about the likelihood of Section 31 infiltration.

Once the data chip was ready, she had to use the pre-arranged system to alert Barnaby that he was needed to convey the data to Earth. He had given her a small communicator the first time he had collected data from her, and that communicator was locked to a special channel monitored by him. All she had to do was activate it and he'd come to pick up the next data chip.

She prepared herself mechanically as she waited for him to arrive; she took a shower and changed into her best civilian clothes. She wore makeup, and even sacrificed a few sprays of perfume from her half-empty bottle. She'd even applied a lubricant up inside her, so that her lack of attraction to Barnaby wouldn't be that noticeable.

She hated the thought of what she was about to do; it smacked of desperation. She'd never traded her body for anything before – even her arrangement with McCoy, back at the beginning, had been about mutual pleasure. She was going to use her body to extract information from a suspected spy. By having sex with him she could well be saving the Outer Territories from Romulan attack and the Federation from all-out war with the Empire. This was an act of aggression on her part, not passivity.

Knowing all of that didn't make her feel any better, though.

Barnaby arrived within forty minutes of the communicator being activated, and looked at her appreciatively as he entered the living area of the pod.

"You're looking good, Chapel," he said, his eyes raking up and down her body. "Special occasion?"

Christine tried her best to appear artless and unconcerned. The best lies, she'd been taught, are the ones that contain the most truth. Her micro expressions and her body language was less likely to give her away if she was telling as much truth as she could.

"I just felt the need to be different for a while," she said. "It's been crazy here – first the explosion and then the births and all that on top of managing all the other injuries with Ramirez being away on the patient transport. I wanted a little _indulgence_ tonight."

"And what makes tonight so special?" Barnaby asked, pulling off his jacket and throwing it loosely over the back of the sofa. He threw himself down in an armchair, uninvited, and leant forwards slightly, towards Christine.

Christine shrugged, letting the wide neck of her tunic slip off her shoulder, revealing its bare, creamy skin to Barnaby's gaze.

"I could give you some bullshit lines," she told him, moving closer to him. "But you're too smart to see through them, so I'm just going to be honest."

She stood before him, making him look up at her. Her breasts caught his attention in particular, probably because she had dispensed with her bra.

"I've been here for almost a year, and I haven't had sex with anybody during that time," she told him, using her best matter-of-fact voice. "I didn't know who I could trust."

"Go on," Barnaby said, his eyes flicking between her breasts and her mouth.

"Then it occurred to me when I was compiling the data chip," Christine said. "You've got to be in the same position as me, alone out here in the middle of nowhere, not knowing who you can trust."

"It's not easy," Barnaby admitted. "Most of us in the research base are men, and I'm not interested in that. The only woman is only interested in women, so, we're all a bit stuck."

"Not even on one of those cold, lonely nights?" Christine teased. "All of you out there in the middle of nowhere, with nobody else around to...lend a hand?"

She'd moved closer now, pushing her distaste for the act down deep into the corner of her mind, pretending that the bland and utterly forgettable man in front of her was really Len McCoy. She sat straddling his lap, and let her hand rest suggestively on his crotch.

"No," he gasped, and she slid her hand up and down, trying to elicit some response from him. She could feel the beginning of an erection forming. Much like Barnaby, it was eminently forgettable.

"So, you'd be amenable, then?" she asked coyly. "I didn't know if you'd be interested."

"I'm very interested," he leered, and grabbed hold of her breasts. She tried not to wince. She'd left her bra off so this whole business could be over more quickly.

She pulled her tunic top off and let Barnaby pounce on her breasts as she writhed in his lap, trying to hurry the whole affair along. He wasn't an inconsiderate lover, she thought charitably; every so often he'd ask "Is this good?" or "You like this?" and each time she breathlessly indicated that she was enjoying every second. It was much like sex with Roger, she thought. Part of her mind could detach and float away while her body responded to his mechanically.

Now there was a difference between Roger and Len, she thought as she rose from the chair and urged Barnaby towards the bed. Sex with Len had been so...vital. She'd never detached from the experience because she never been able to. All of her senses were caught up.

Barnaby pushed her to her back, but she flipped to her front, pushed her backside in the air and told him in a breathy voice that she enjoyed this position a lot more. It had the benefit of being true, as well as meaning that she didn't have to look at him as he thrust into her. He really didn't seem to mind the change in position at all, and thrust away with small groaning honks of noise. Christine buried her head in the pillows, all the better to hide her snorts of laughter at the ridiculous noises he was making.

She rested her weight on one arm, and reached down to touch herself. Barnaby's hands were glued to her hips and he didn't seem likely to remember that she'd need a bit of help getting off. She took a deep breath and tried to remove Barnaby from her mind. It wasn't him and his average cock trying to bury himself into her, it was Len. She thought of the time they'd snuck back to his shared quarters, where they'd had to be quick because Kirk was due back from classes. She hadn't had to get herself off as the force of his thrusts from behind her had rubbed her against the side of the mattress in such a way that she'd come before he did, loudly and explosively.

The memories helped, and she managed a brief but real orgasm before Barnaby let out one final ridiculous honking noise and collapsed onto her. She could feel the semen leak from her as Barnaby shifted and pulled out of her, and she grimaced at the thought of the STI repression medication she knew she'd be taking just in case he was infected with something.

She tolerated some awkward cuddling before she excused herself to clean up in the bathroom. She'd secreted her specialised tricorder there, and it was a matter of seconds for her to start the genetic scan. She had a thorough sonic shower, but she suspected that she'd be back in there later to use the water shower.

When she came out of the bathroom, wearing a robe, Barnaby was already mostly dressed.

"I have to get the data chip up to the base," he said, faux-apologetically. He didn't offer to return later and Christine didn't ask him to.

"Of course," she said, smiling at him. "Thanks for sticking around and helping me out."

"You're very welcome," he said, oozing a smile at her. "Maybe next time I could stay a little longer."

"Maybe," Christine said, escorting him to the door. em_Never/em_, she vowed internally.

Chapter Thirteen

As soon as she got him through the door she went on a flurry of cleaning, stripping the bed and putting the sheets into her wash and sterilise unit and then jumping into the water shower and scrubbing herself with her nicest-smelling body wash.

She didn't feel dirty, exactly, because what she did was necessary. She hadn't been forced into doing anything she disliked; it was just another unsatisfying sexual experience and lord only knew how many of those she'd had. She felt guilty, she realised, of cheating on McCoy which was ridiculous because she'd been the one to sever their connection and walk away.

Of course, he'd been stubborn and refused to believe that the connection was severed. He'd seen her two-year absence as nothing more than a small inconvenience that could be waited out. He'd flat out told her that he'd be waiting for her to reappear in his life.

She desperately wanted to do that.

Christine rested her head against the wall of the tiny shower cubicle. God, her life was complicated.

A small beeping noise told her the tricorder had finished its work. She got out of the shower, dried off, pulled on some sleep pants and a camisole and loaded the data from the tricorder into her computer. She tried to get some sleep, knowing that if the computer told her that Barnaby was human then she'd at least have an ally in her hunt for the real spy. The thought that she might have to kill Barnaby if he turned out to be a genetically altered Romulan was what kept her awake for most of the night.

The computer was quicker than usual in its analysis, as there had been only one sample inputted. The results came almost twelve hours after Barnaby had visited her pod, and Christine had been a nervous wreck waiting for them. By now her message back to Earth would have been sent, including her hidden one with her suspicions about the Section 31 team on the planet, most of whom she hadn't seen. If he was the spy, Barnaby should have been relieved as her message seemed to imply that his mission had been successful.

When the computer screen finally displayed the results of Barnaby's genetic scan, she swore. It was em_almost/em_ perfect. To an unsuspicious eye, he would have passed for human. However, the testing Section 31 had demanded was more thorough than usual genetic screening and it had revealed some irregularities which looked to Christine, with her background in biochemistry and xeno-medicine, as definitely non-human.

She ran the results through a comparison database. How they had Romulan DNA in there she didn't know; no face to face contact had ever occurred between the Federation and the Romulans. They'd been seen, of course, over viewscreens when the treaty that lead to the Neutral Zone being formed had been agreed, but they'd never sat around a table with the Federation. Section 31 at work again, no doubt.

The Romulan DNA was very similar to Vulcan DNA, she noticed, as the comparison was being analysed. Perhaps the Vulcans and the Romulans shared a common ancestor race? It was a pity that the Vulcan homeworld had been destroyed so comprehensively, killing so many Vulcans. Perhaps there had been evidence somewhere in their archives.

Her mood soured when the comparison scan had been completed. The small irregularities in Barnaby's DNA were definitely of Romulan origin. She heard a high-pitched whine in her ears, and she had to sit down because her vision was going blurry. Panic raced through her, causing her stomach to roil.

_emThis was supposed to be easy/em_, she thought, anger mixing with the _Just analysis, no terminations./em_

Killing Barnaby was her only action, she realised, the small part of her mind that always functioned in a calm, logical way told her. He was a spy, and a traitor. She was alone on the planet with no support system. The other Section 31 agents were researchers, scientists, and she had no way of contacting them other than through Barnaby. She didn't even know where the Section 31 base was located. It could be anywhere on the planet!

_emNo/em_, the little voice said. em_Think carefully. Research bases need power and water. This planet only has one settlement with those things. Section 31 is Starfleet. Starfleet built two facilities here. The medical centre, which is tiny, and the ore processing plant, which is huge. Which is more likely to mask an underground base?/em_

It had to be the ore processing plant, she reasoned. Somewhere underneath it all was another facility, leaching their water and power from the giant structure above. After she killed Barnaby she had to get to the plant and find a way into the secret base, convince the scientists that she was right about Barnaby's DNA and get a message to Earth.

"As long as that's all," she said to herself as she tugged a small case out from under her bed. "I'd hate to have a busy day, after all."

Inside the case was some serious ordinance, given to her by an armoury officer on board the _Valient_ as part of her kit. There were two hand phasers, a selection of grenades that ran from the non-lethal smoke variety to the incredibly deadly explosive kind, a phaser rifle that split into small parts and could be assembled within twenty seconds and even some pressure-sensitive land mines.

"These are nasty," the armoury officer had said, shaking his head at the manifest list as he had packed the case for her. "Once armed, the slightest pressure causes a massive explosion. You'll be picking bits off the ceiling. If the ceiling's still there, which I doubt it will be."

She selected the hand phasers, and set them to kill. One she put in a holster that sat on a belt, at the small of her back. The other she still had in her hand when the lock to the door of her pod was over-ridden and Barnaby walked into the room.

"Shooting practice?" he asked, raising his own weapon as he came towards her. "Or do you have a particular target in mind?"

Christine let off three or four shots as she jumped for cover behind the sofa. She must have winged him, because she heard him swear and smelt the singeing of his clothing.

His shots were a bit wild, giving her time to move around towards him. She had to get him away from the computer. She hadn't had time to upload the results of his analysis to a data chip yet. If he destroyed the computer, then her proof was gone too.

"Who are you?" she called to him.

"I'm Lieutenant Jeff Barnaby," he called back, from his cover behind the bed.

"And the rest," she said impatiently. "Who are you really? What's your real name and rank?"

She popped her head over the sofa and fired at the bed, forcing him to retreat backwards and take cover in the bathroom. She used the opportunity to save the data on the computer to a chip.

"It doesn't matter who I am," his voice came back from the bathroom. "You're dead, all of you."

"What do you mean?" Christine said, ducking as a blast from inside the bathroom cut neatly through the inner wall of the pod and hit the far wall.

"I found your little hidden message," he said, the sneer in his voice quite clear through the wall. "I was forced to contact my real masters on Romulus. As we speak imperial warbirds are breaching the Neutral Zone on their way to take this planet and the rest of the Territories."

Christine let loose a fierce barrage of shots at the wall.

"There are children here, you sick bastard!" she shouted.

Fire from the bathroom told her that he was still alive. The computer beeped, and she inched her way over to collect the data chip. Having no free pockets, she tucked it securely in her bra where it sat nestled safely next to her skin.

"A few less to grow up as soldiers for the Federation," he said dismissively, and that's what really made her angry. The case containing the grenades and the mines was a few feet away. She sent shot after shot at the bathroom as she got to the case, wriggling across the floor to try and avoid the return fire. She pulled one of the mines from the case, took a deep breath and commando-crawled towards the bathroom door. She placed the mine as quietly as she could by the door, and pressed the activation button. She quickly wriggled back to the weapons case, and retreated further back to the door of the pod.

Her pod was adjacent to the medical centre, which was separated from the main bulk of houses by some distance. Blowing the mine would probably damage the medical centre, but no innocent person would be hurt by it. em_Just him/em_, Christine thought grimly, em_and if I don't run fast enough, me./em_

When the next shot came from the bathroom, she let out an agonised scream. Her returned shots were deliberately wide, and trailed off quickly.

There was silence from the bathroom, then the door, riddled with holes, hissed open. Christine lay on the floor by the door, feigning death. She heard a hesitant footstep, then another, then a faint click as the mine was activated. She scrambled to her feet and threw herself from the pod, running as fast as she could before the explosion hit.

The force of the blast knocked her from her feet, and the skin on the back of her legs and her neck felt hot as the flames exploded upwards. She was had a few nasty cuts and a few scorch marks on her clothes, but she was in one piece, which was more than could be said for her surroundings.

Parts of the pod, blown skyward by the explosion, came whistling down next to her, as did parts of Barnaby. She grimaced as part of his skull dropped next to her, his eyeball popping out. That calmly logical side of her brain told her that retinal scanning was probably a major feature of the secret base security, and that was what made her pluck the gelatinous eyeball up and secure it as best she could inside her weapons case.

She got to her feet, picked up the weapons case, and began running towards the settlement.

The explosion had caused all the settlement to come running from their homes, and they looked at Christine in shock. She cut over all their cries with a firm "Romulan warbirds are on their way, and they will attack."

Panic took over, and people began to run back to their homes to collect loved ones and precious items.

"We've drilled for this!" called one settler, who had become the town's defacto mayor and chief organiser. "Into the caves in the hills. Everyone hurry!"

As they all left to start their ground vehicles and make their way to deep caves in the hillside nearby, the mayor turned to Christine.

"You're welcome too, Miss," he told her. "You and all the Starfleet people. We've laid down provisions and weapons in there."

"I've got to go to the plant," Christine said, kneeling on the ground to assemble the phaser rifle. "You go, quickly. I'm going to send a message to Starfleet and tell them to send help."

The mayor looked at her gravely. "It'll be a long time in coming, Miss," he warned. "Not too many ships out here that can match a Romulan warbird."

"We're going to have to cross our fingers and hope, then," she said, rifle assembled. "Good luck."

"You too," he said, and then returned to the mass of people running for their vehicles.

Christine ploughed her way determinedly through the mass of fleeing people. Several of them tried to call out to her, but she had no time to stop and talk to them. In the ore processing plant the few Starfleet staff and their families were already gathering.

"Romulan warbirds are heading across the neutral zone," Christine reported to the chief engineer of the station. "We have to get a message to the nearest starship."

"How do you know?" he demanded. "What was the explosion in the town?"

Grabbing him by the elbow, Christine yanked him away from the crowd of people and into a small office.

"You were here supervising the construction of the plant, right?" she asked.

"Yes, but Ensign, I demand to know...," the engineer began.

"Then you are aware of the location of the base beneath the plant? The secret research facility?"

"How did you...yes, I am aware," he replied, frowning. "But nobody else is supposed to. That's classified information, how did...?"

"No time," Christine said shortly. "We need to get everybody down into the base and use the communications array there to call for help."

"Nobody is supposed to know about the base," the engineer repeated, looking torn. "If I reveal the location then we could all be court-martialed!"

"If you don't tell me where the entrance is, we're all going to be killed by the Romulans, so it really doesn't matter about the fucking court-mart..."

Christine was cut off by the noise of high-powered weaponry hitting the side of the plant, followed by great screams from the other officers and the children. Overhead they could hear the huge Romulan ships powering back for another strafing run.

"Lowest level of the plant, section E. There's a section of yellow piping, you can't miss it. There's a retinal scanning point to the right of the pipes...you won't be able to...," the engineer gabbled, but Christine shook her head.

"Got that taken care of," she said, hoping that the padding of the case was enough to protect the eyeball inside it.

"Take the children," the chief engineer insisted. "Get them and the non-combatants down there."

"Okay," Christine said, making for the door. "But you should all get down there too."

The chief engineer shook his head. "We need to make the plant useless to the Romulans," he said grimly.

"If they keep blasting it there won't be a plant," Christine muttered at the structure shook.

"Alright everybody, listen to me," the engineer shouted as they made their way back to the gathered Starfleet personnel. "Ensign Chapel will escort all non-combatants to a secure location on the lowest floor of the base. The rest of us will remain here to render the plant inoperable to the Romulans."

Christine waited while the few children were separated from their parents and those partners who weren't Starfleet said what could be their last goodbyes. She began hustling the unwieldy party down flight after flight of stairs, not trusting the lift system to have survived the attack undamaged. There were three children in their party. Danny, the boy who needed constant medication for a heart condition, was the eldest at seven. The others were girls, aged five and just over one. They were being carried by a parent. There were five adults, three men and two women. They all looked terrified, and Christine wondered about the reasoning behind living on a planet so close to the border with Neutral Zone with small children.

"It's going to fun, Emma," she heard the mother of the five year old tell her daughter in a shaky voice. "It's going to be hide and seek. We're going to hide, and Daddy will come find us later."

Christine forged on, deliberately not thinking about whether "later" would every happen.

She found the stretch of yellow piping at the end of the corridor, and the retinal scanner tucked innocuously next to it.

"Make them look away," she warned the parents as she opened the weapons case.

"Oh my God, that's disgusting," muttered somebody as the children were all turned away from Christine.

She gingerly held the eyeball up to the scanner, which read it without complaint. The yellow pipes suddenly cracked down the middle and split open to reveal a long corridor which sloped downwards.

"Hurry," Christine said, fighting the urge to wipe her hand on her uniform skirt.

"What is this?" one of the men demanded. "Why did you need an eyeball to get in here?"

"Explanations later," Christine said, stepping into the corridor as the doors sealed shut behind them. "Move."

She elbowed her way to the front of the group and began running down the corridor, but she soon skidded to a halt when a nervous-looking man with a rifle even bigger than hers suddenly appeared in front of her, gesturing wildly with it. It was clear that he'd never held a weapon like that before, let alone fired it.

"Stop!" he shouted. "This is a secret facility!"

"Ensign Christine Chapel, Section 31," Christine said, with her hands raised. "I was Barnaby's contact in the settlement."

"Where is he?" demanded the man.

"Dead," Christine said shortly. "He was a genetically modified Romulan agent who had managed to breach Section 31 security. He was the one who called in the Romulan warbirds who are trying to blow up the plant on top of this base. We need to get a message out to Starfleet immediately."

"How did you get in here?" the man asked, his rifle faltering in front of him.

Wordlessly, Christine held the eyeball in the air.

"That's em_disgusting/em_," the scientist said in horror.

"Catch," said Christine, tossing the eyeball to the scientist. He dropped his gun as he scrambled to catch the eyeball, which he also promptly dropped.

Christine grabbed the large phaser rifle from him.

"We need to get these civilians somewhere safe, and get a message to Starfleet," she told him, marching purposefully forward down the corridor. The scientist got swept up by the group of people following after her. She told herself that she didn't hear a slight squelching noise under her boot.

"There are rooms down there," the scientist said, pointing towards a corridor to the right.

"Is there another way out?" Christine demanded.

"No," he said, just as the remaining contingent of Section 31 scientists came running around the corner. "The only way is through the door up there."

"You have a transporter pad?" she asked.

"We have a pre-programmed one that takes you to a spot outside of town," one of the other scientists volunteered. "But it can only handle one at a time."

"She killed Barnaby," the first scientist told the other two in a sort of fascinated glee. "He was a Romulan agent."

The looks of horror on the faces of the scientists weren't faked, but neither was their fear.

"I have to put these people somewhere safe," she said to the small group. "And I have to send a message to Starfleet."

Suddenly there was a huge crashing noise from above, and the sound of phaser fire as the whole building vibrated with shockwaves. They clung to each other for support.

"You," Christine said, pointing at the first scientist, "Get these people into a room. Barricade the doors. Take these," she said to two of the adults in the Starfleet party without children, giving them her rifle and the one she had confiscated from the scientist. "Anybody who comes through those doors, you shoot, you understand?"

"Got it," a woman said grimly. "Come on, let's go."

The majority of the party went down the corridor branching right.

"Communications room," Christine told the others. "Now."

Chapter Fourteen

He was on the bridge again. This was the fourth duty shift in a row that he'd found himself leaving his office to go and stand next to Jim on the bridge and watch the stars go sailing past. It wasn't as if he was abandoning his post, he reasoned to himself. Sickbay was running just fine, his staff didn't need babysitting. His paperwork was up to date. He couldn't move any further on his official research into Khan's blood since Starfleet Medical had impounded all the samples he had taken and kidnapped Sickbay's tribble. That had caused a lot of muttering amongst the staff, who had liked the ridiculous ball of fluff. He was still in trouble with some of the nurses for using it to test the treatment for Jim.

Christine wouldn't have seen it like that though. She'd have seen the necessity of his actions, even if she did like the tribble. Hell, she'd probably have seen the link between the tribble and Jim's situation before he had, and she'd have been able to…. Well. It was no point thinking about what she would have done. She wasn't here anymore, and that was all there was to it. Best forget about her, he told himself, like she had told him to do.

He sighed. That was never going to happen.

Of course, his em_unofficial/em_ research into Khan's blood was still moving ahead, as he had "accidentally" forgotten to hand over some vials of blood after they were "mislabelled" and therefore not destroyed with the rest of his work. That should have made him feel guilty, he knew; lying to a superior officer and disobeying direct orders were court martial offenses and could mean he'd be holed up in a brig somewhere unpleasant for a few years. However, he'd saved his best friend's life and who knew how many other lives could be saved if Starfleet Medical got that massive stick out of its collective ass…He'd just have to keep on working in secret for now.

Christine would have done exactly the same thing, he thought, straying back to the impossible blonde. And she'd have smiled to the idiot from Medical as he vaporised the official samples too.

He grinned to himself, enjoying the mental scene.

"What's got you grinning, Bones?" Jim said slyly, interrupting him.

McCoy was jerked back to the present and away from thoughts of the past. He focused on the bridge, the ever-present chirrups from the control panels and the quiet buzz of the bridge crew as they went about their business.

"Thinking about a certain blonde?" Jim pressed, thankfully dropping his voice so nobody but McCoy could hear him.

"What?" McCoy blustered, but relaxed as Jim gestured none too subtly towards Carol Marcus, who was peering over a data readout with Spock.

"No," McCoy said shortly.

"Those steady hands get shot down, huh?" Jim commiserated, but an evil look of glee present in his eyes.

"No!" McCoy all but shouted, raising a few eyebrows from the crew around him. "No," he continued at a much quieter tone."No, I didn't get shot down, as I didn't make a move because I'm not interested."

"Really," Jim said, clearly not believing him for a minute. "Because I would have thought you'd have been very interested. You have a type."

"I do not have a type," McCoy sighed.

"Tall, blonde, blue eyes, no-nonsense, very clever…ringing any bells?"

"I'm sorry Jim, but that's not how I see our relationship developing," McCoy said, eyes rolling. "And you're stuffed full of nonsense."

"Ha ha," Jim replied, sticking determinedly to his guns. "You know who I mean."

"I'm not sure I do," McCoy ground out, playing his obstinate doctor routine to the last.

"I mean," Jim started, but was cut off by a loud shout from Uhura.

"Distress call detected, captain!"

"On screen, lieutenant," Jim replied, the banter with McCoy dropped immediately as he focused on the large viewscreen in front of him.

"My God, Christine," McCoy blurted as a dishevelled, bleeding, soot-stained Christine Chapel appeared in front of him.

"If anyone is receiving this, this is an emergency distress call from the Federation settlement on Lintallia in the Outer Territories. We have been attacked by Romulan warbirds. We have no defences and the civilian population is in hiding. Repeat, this the Federation settlement of Lintallia requesting medical aid. There are children…"

The rest of the message was a burst of static, and then Christine disappeared from the screen.

"Get her back!" ordered Kirk.

Uhura shook her head. "That was an automated message captain, sent six hours ago. We've only just reached the limit of their broadcast beacon."

"Chekov, set course for Lintallia, warp eight," Kirk ordered. "Spock, scan for Romulan activity. McCoy, get ready for incoming casualties."

The bridge hustled to get ready for their new, unexpected mission. As McCoy ran for the turbolift he heard Jim order Carol Marcus to prepare a report on the settlement's layout and defensive capability and Spock begin the ultimately futile process of trying to convince Jim that he shouldn't lead the landing party himself. He began issuing orders himself as soon as he burst through the door of Sickbay, putting into plan one of the many scenarios his staff had been drilling on ever since the academy. As he signed off on equipment requisitions and oversaw medical kits being hastily assembled for beam down, he thought of Christine, battered and bruised but alive.

Alive six hours ago, he reminded himself grimly. All she had to do was hang on for just a little bit longer.

Chapter Fifteen

The door to the secret facility were breached about ten minutes after the Romulans stopped firing their shipboard weapons at the plant. Christine had just finished uploading the data from the chip in her bra to the message she had recorded when a huge explosion rocked through the room, sending her crashing to the floor.

"What was that?" one of the scientists yelled.

"Romulans," Christine said shortly. She hit the repeat command, and then the send button. The computer reported that the message had been sent and relayed to the furthest communications buoy, and she just hoped that somebody very well armed heard it and came to the rescue.

"What do we do?" another scientist said, fiddling with a small package that she pulled from her trouser pocket.

"We try and hold them off long enough for help to get here," Christine said determinedly. "Where's your weapons cache?"

"I'll get it," the third scientist said. He also seemed to be holding a small packet. He came back a moment later with a large metal case.

"With me," Christine ordered, and they obediently followed her down the corridor to the room housing the scared civilians.

"It's Christine Chapel," she called as a precaution. "I'm coming in."

"It's clear," somebody called back, and the door opened. She and the scientists hustled through, carrying the large metal case.

"Everybody alright?" Christine asked, looking around the room. The explosion had made the children cry, and they were being comforted as best they could by their parents. The others had made a makeshift barricade of whatever furniture had been in the room – metal cupboards, chairs, tables, anything they could lay their hands on.

"Okay for now," one of the men said grimly. "But that last explosion was very close."

"They're not through yet, but they will be on the next try," Christine said, opening her own weapons case and the larger one belonging to the facility. "Everyone should be armed. I'm going back out there to lay a few traps for anybody coming down the corridor. When I come back, I'll use a codeword. If I don't say the word, you don't let me in, you understand?"

"Got it," the man said grimly. "What's the word?"

"Screwdriver," Christine said after a pause, remembering her first ever test scenario for Section 31.

"Right," the man agreed. "Screwdriver."

Christine took the combined stock of pressure mines and the roll of thin and hard-to-spot trip wire as well as the smoke grenades. She went out of the room and back up to the main door to the facility, which was buckled and dented but had not yet given way. Moving quickly but carefully, Christine set a series of trip wires and pressure mines along the corridor. Setting off the mines would bring the ceiling down in the corridor, but she had spotted a very sturdy pair of blast doors that she could use to block the side corridor with the civilians in from any explosions.

She could hear harsh language coming from the corridor, so she worked as quickly as she could. Just before she stepped through the blast doors and sealed them, she set off as many smoke grenades as she could, completely disguising all of her improvised booby traps.

"Screwdriver," she said, banging on the door to the safe room. Once the doors had opened and shut, she set about fusing the lock to the door.

"Why are you doing that?" one of the scientists demanded.

"One more obstacle between us and the enemy," she said, remembering a particularly hardened tutor from Section 31. He had drummed it into her head that anything that could slow a pursuer down was worth doing, no matter how seemingly simple.

"They'll just blow the door straight through," said the female scientist bitterly. She was still handling the small packet.

"Shut up," Christine said, turning on her dangerously. "You never know what's going to happen. Negative thinking won't get us anywhere."

"We're all going to die," said another, with the same packet in his hands.

"If you don't stop being so fucking defeatist, I'll shoot you myself," she warned him.

"What's the situation out there?" asked one of the parents, the mother of the youngest child.

"The main doors are still holding," Christine reported, "Although I did hear voices in the corridor. I've laid down pressure mines and trip wires throughout the main corridor down, and set off smoke grenades so they won't see where they're going. I've sealed the blast doors, and they looked stronger than the main doors."

"Did you send a distress call?" asked the mother of Emma, the five year old.

"I did," she assured her. "It's gone to the furthest communications buoy. Somebody will hear it."

"If they get here in time," she heard the man behind her mutter.

"That's it," she said, adjusting her phaser to the stun setting. "You were warned."

"Don't shoot!" he said, flinging his hands in the air. The packet he'd been holding fell at her feet, and she picked it up.

"What is this?" she asked, looking at it carefully. "Is it some kind of drug?"

The scientists looked at each other, before the woman spoke.

"It's a suicide pill," she said heavily. "We were given them in case something like this happens."

"You won't need it," Christine said, tossing it back to the man.

"That's alright for you to say," he snorted. "You agents have got that chip, haven't you?"

"What chip?" she said, confused.

"The tracking chip," the woman said. "The one that Section 31 uses to monitor you? Once they know the Romulans are here they'll activate your tracking chip. Once they see your body reacting to torture, they'll just shut you down remotely."

"They em_what/em_?" Christine asked, shocked, but any further communication was halted by the sound of the first door being breached and the first pressure mine being activated.

Chapter Sixteen

"Coming up on the planet in ninety seconds, Captain," Sulu reported from the bridge. "Prepare to beam down."

"Do you have the warbirds on long range sensors?" Kirk asked from his position in the transporter room.

"Aye sir. Sensors report two warbirds in the lower atmosphere. Scans reveal a small number of life signs on each ship; I presume that the majority of the crew are down on the planet itself."

"The computer shows a large number of human life signs concentrated in the hills surrounding the settlement, captain," Spock said, looking at the terminal in the wall of the transporter room. "But the hills contain a mineral that disrupts the transporter process. It would be unwise to beam the settlers directly from there."

"Change of plans, Spock," Kirk said. "You take a fleet of shuttles and go down there to pick up the settlers. Sulu will lay down cover fire and engage the warbirds. You understand, Mr Sulu?"

"Aye sir," Sulu reported. "Sensors don't show much in the way of firepower."

"They've probably used it all up blowing up the plant," McCoy muttered.

"They likely did not expect armed retaliation," Spock corrected him. "And not from a starship of our class and armament."

"Well let's use some of it to blow the pointy eared bastards out of the sky, shall we?" McCoy said impatiently. "Uh...sorry, Spock," he said afterwards. "I didn't mean you."

"I was in no doubt to that, Doctor," Spock said.

"Shuttlebay," Kirk reminded him, and Spock nodded, and left.

"We're within beaming range," Scott said from behind the console. "The ore processing plant looks beaten up, but I can detect a small group of human life signs on the surface, surrounded by a large group of Romulans. There's another group, much further down under the surface of the plant. There's more Romulans there, too."

"How many?" Kirk asked, taking his place on the transporter pad along with McCoy and a full contingent of security personnel.

"Twenty surrounding the humans on the surface, another twenty underground. Heat signatures, captain," Scott said in alarm. "Bombs going off underneath the ground, I think. The life signs down there are disappearing."

"Get us near the group on top," Kirk instructed. "Try and find us some cover."

"Aye sir," Scott said, frowning.

"Energise," Kirk ordered, and the transporter room disappeared to reveal the brown gritty dirt of the planet and a few scrubby bushes and trees. The team from the em_Enterprise/em_ and the second security team had been beamed behind an outcrop of rocks, where they could see Starfleet personnel surrounded by a ring of Romulans. The Starfleet officers were bruised and bleeding, and the Enterprise officers saw a defiant looking woman taking a brutal punch to the jaw from one of the Romulans.

"Wait," Kirk said, grabbing McCoy's hand as he made to break cover.

"He's going to kill her, Jim," McCoy hissed.

"em_Wait/em_," Kirk insisted.

Just then, the majestic sight of the Enterprise firing all its phaser banks at the two warbirds passed overhead. The Romulans reacted in astonishment, breaking ranks and staring at the sky.

"Now!" he shouted, and the two groups broke cover from behind the rocks. McCoy let off a few shots, but he didn't think he hit anybody. He was more concerned about getting to the wounded officers.

"Thank God," one man wheezed as he ran up to them. "You've got to help Simons."

Simons was a large man with a serious phaser wound in his abdomen.

"You're going to be fine," McCoy told the man. "I'm going to get you beamed straight into Sickbay, you'll be right as rain."

The pain must have been excruciating, but Simons managed to grab McCoy's hand. "Family," he said through gritted teeth. "Down. Section E."

"We know, and we're going to get them," he told him, flipping open his communicator. "McCoy to Enterprise, five to beam to Sickbay, one critical. Inform M'Benga he needs to prep for abdominal surgery, phaser damage, high setting."

His call was acknowledged and the injured officers disappeared in the transporter's glow. In the distance he could see a chain of shuttles land in the distant hills, and above him the Enterprise had coaxed the two warbirds up out of the atmosphere and away from the Romulans left on the ground.

Not that the Romulans on this patch of ground would need assistance, because they were all dead. None of them had taken the opportunity to surrender that he'd heard Kirk offer, so he didn't feel particularly sorry for them.

"Jim," he called. "We need to get down there. The engineer said section E."

"Let's go," Kirk instructed, and the security guards took the lead as they made their way through the damaged plant.

"Christ, this place really took a beating," McCoy said, taking in the twisted ceiling props and the missing wall sections.

"It still is," Kirk said, frowning. "Can't you feel that?"

The vibrations came through the floor and into the soles of their boots.

"What is it?" McCoy said, as they all picked up their speed as they made their way down flight after flight of stairs.

"My guess? They're trying to blow their way into the section that Chapel and the civilians are in," Kirk said.

They came down the last flight of stairs and looked in horror at the number of dead and dying Romulans scattered around the entrance to a hidden corridor. The floor was slick with green blood, and the stench was disgusting.

"Looks like Chapel wasn't giving up easily," Kirk said, motioning his men on carefully. One of the Romulans grabbed his ankle and tried to say something to him, but all that came from his mouth were some blood-flecked bubbles. He died, still clutching Kirk's ankle and McCoy leaned down to gently unwrap his fingers.

"We've got booby-traps, captain!" called the advance scout. "I can see trip wires and I think...yeah, there are a few mines down here that haven't been activated yet."

"Hold back," Kirk ordered. He went up to the mouth of the door and peered inside to see yet more bodies, and a group of Romulans trapped on a small section of ground between the rubble behind them and a set of blast doors that looked as if they were one explosion away from falling down.

"Gentlemen!" he called cheerily. "On behalf of the United Federation of Planets I'd like to offer you the chance to surrender and..."

He ducked back into the corridor just in time for the volley of phaser fire to miss his head.

"Right boys, sitting ducks," he said. "Permission to shoot."

The engagement was over in minutes. There was no cover in the corridor, except for the bodies of those that had died around them.

"Can we get down there?" McCoy asked.

The senior security officer shook his head. "The place's a death trap," he said. "I have no way of knowing where the remaining mines are, or how many are left."

"We could beam in," another security officer offered.

"Whoever's down there is probably armed and incredibly paranoid," Kirk said thoughtfully. "I know I would be. Whoever beamed in would be taken out on sight."

"Get the ship to beam down a communicator," McCoy suggested.

"Let's hope they don't blow that up too," Kirk said, flipping his communicator open to establish contact with the ship.

The room had been small to start with, but with nine adults and three children, one of whom needing a diaper change, it felt even smaller. Everyone was tense and on edge, and had been for the six hours that they'd been barricaded in there.

Christine had considered confiscating the suicide pills from the scientists, but she decided not to. If the Romulans did breach the doors, they'd want the scientists. Barnaby had probably been feeding them all of the confidential research they'd done while stationed here, but the scientists would be useful. Perhaps suicide was a better option than torture.

Torture made Christine think of the chip inside her. How dare they not tell her about that? How dare they decide when she should live and when she should die? As soon as they got out of here, she vowed, she was getting that chip out of her and if Admiral Marcus himself got angry with her she'd take that chip and shove it so far up his ass...

A light noise made her turn her head. They'd suffered their way through several waves of Romulans trying to make it down the corridor, but this didn't sound like heavy boots or muffled explosions or screams of pain. It sounded like a transporter beam.

She was covering the location of the sound with her weapon, as were the others in the room, when the beam coalesced into an object.

"It's a communicator," the man closest to the object said.

The communicator was open, and Christine heard a familiar voice through the comm. line.

"Ensign Chapel? This is Captain James Kirk of the em_Enterprise/em_. Do you read me, Ensign?"

"Oh thank God," Christine breathed, grabbing the communicator.

"This is Chapel, reading you loud and clear, Captain," she said. "Nine adults, two children, one infant require immediate extraction. Do not use the corridor, there are mines..."

"I can see that," Kirk said, amusement in his voice. "We'll beam you straight to Sickbay. Kirk out."

"We're going to be okay," she told the group, tears forming in her eyes. Some of them were already crying, the others were hugging. The children were confused and the baby was screaming indignantly, but the scientists weren't part of the group. She turned to find them, only to see them ripping their packets open and swallowing the contents.

"No!" she screamed, but the scientists had started frothing at the mouth, and were making awful retching noises as they clawed at their throats.

The transporter beams hit just as she moved towards them, and she was trapped as she felt the familiar tingle of the transporter start throughout her body.

She appeared in a crowded and busy Sickbay.

"I need a doctor!" she shouted, dropping next to the nearest scientist. "Three adults, two male, one female, all ingested unknown toxin thirty seconds ago. Toxin is lethal."

She was buffeted out of the way by medical staff who wrestled the limp scientists onto guerneys and away into screened off rooms.

Between the injured officers who had beamed up earlier, the new casualties and the surgery that was taking place on the shot officer, Sickbay was running out of nurses to help the new arrivals.

"Everybody sit down," Chapel commanded. "You need to be checked over, but let's get some water in you first. You must all be dehydrated, especially the baby."

They all sat obediently while she replicated bottles of water with electrolytes in them. They drank the water as they were reunited with their families, who had been beamed up earlier.

"Here's a bottle," Christine said, handing an infant bottle to the baby's mother. "And I found a changing kit with some diapers. No," she protested, as the mother put down her own water. "I can do this for a second. You finish your water and see your husband."

Gratefully, the woman sagged back against the biobed and held onto her husband's hand as Christine found a spare surface to lay the baby on to change its diaper. She ran her hands under the steriliser and was shocked to see the colour of her skin as the dirt disappeared.

"I think I need a change too, kid," she said as she manoeuvred the child out of the dirty diaper and began to clean her.

The child stopped grizzling as her bottom became clean, and went so far to grace Christine with a smile when she had a new diaper. Christine handed the baby and the bottle to her mother and started to run diagnostic scans on the rescued civilians as they sipped their water and relaxed in the safety of Sickbay.

"There you are," boomed a loud voice, and Christine turned in time to see McCoy stalk across the room to her.

"I don't see you for a year and then you turn up in my Sickbay looking like you've been in a fight, taking over the place!" he accused, before sweeping her up into a crushing hug.

The feeling of safety and security came crashing over Christine, and her tears finally came.

"I'm so glad you came," she sobbed.

"I know, sweetheart," McCoy said, guiding her over to a small room.

"No," she said, struggling out of his arms. "You've got three people with poison to see. And the rest of the..."

"Shut up," McCoy said firmly, catching his arm underneath her legs and sweeping her off her feet.

Shocked, Christine stayed silent as McCoy carried her into the small room and placed her gently on the bed. She tried to sit up, but he pushed her back down as he stared intently at the read-out above her head.

"Your vitals are good," he said at last. "You're filthy, your cuts need cleaning and you've got some minor burns, but you'll survive until I get back. Do. Not. Move," he warned her, poking her with his finger. "I'll be back soon."

She nodded, and he left, looking backwards over his shoulder at her as he did, as if he couldn't quite believe she was there.

Christine laid back and closed her eyes, not quite believing that her day had been as eventful as it had. Her eyes popped open again almost immediately. The chip. She had to find the chip.

The small room was well stocked, and she found a tricorder in a cupboard. She scanned herself as thoroughly as she could, but the machine didn't register anything out of the ordinary.

"Well, it wouldn't, would it?" she muttered to herself. "It would be found in any medical screening if it was that easy."

The room was equipped with a portable mediscanner, which was able to see a lot more than the medical tricorder could. She programmed it to search for any elements or compounds not normally found in the human body, and lay under it, waiting for the scan to complete. The arm of the machine moved slowly along her body as it completed the programme, and it was almost done when McCoy came back into the room, followed by Kirk.

"I told you not to move," McCoy said immediately. "I believe that instruction implied 'do not run complicated medical tests upon yourself'."

"I just thought that I'd err on the side of caution," Christine said airily, while frantically miming the writing gesture.

"Are you alright?" McCoy asked dubiously as Christine pointed at the PADD under Kirk's arm and gestured again.

"You tell me!" she said brightly. "You're the one who can see the scanner!"

Again, she pointed at the PADD, which Kirk hesitantly gave her.

CHIP LODGED SOMEWHERE IN BODY, she typed. REMOTE ACTIVATION. WILL KILL ME.

"So, Ensign, you look like you've had a busy day," Kirk said jovially as he took back the PADD and typed WHERE? WHO? WHY?

"It's been an adventure, sir," she said. "Just cuts and bruises and a few burns though, I think. Are the others alright?"

She grabbed the PADD and typed SECTION 31, SECRET DEPARTMENT. ADMIRAL MARCUS.

"Dehydration and hunger for the most part," McCoy said slowly, looking at Kirk. "Some nasty injuries to the ones that the Romulans got their hands on, but nothing we can't fix in time. Surgery is going well, so M'Benga will keep going on that."

MARCUS DEAD, Kirk typed on the PADD.

Christine's eyebrows zoomed to her hairline.

"That is good news," she managed to say, while typing SECTION 31 STILL ACTIVE. DON'T DISCUSS NEAR ME. MUST GET CHIP OUT ASAP.

She'd underlined the 'must' three times with the stylus.

"I don't like the look of some of these burns, Ensign," McCoy said. "I'm going to have to run a dermal regenerator over you, and that's going to be painful. I'm going to give you a sedative, and when you wake up you'll be as good as new. I promise."

He grabbed her hand and squeezed it, emphasising his words.

"I hope so," she said, squeezing back.

PROBABLY IN MY BRAIN, she typed. DESIGNED TO ACTIVATE IF THEY THINK I'M BEING TORTURED OR WILL GIVE UP SECRETS. SCIENTISTS SECTION 31. SUICIDE PILLS.

"Don't you worry about anything," Kirk stressed, taking the PADD from her. "You're safe here, Christine."

McCoy put a hypospray to her neck, and the world went black.

Chapter Seventeen

McCoy waited until she was unconscious, then yelled for a nurse to stand in the room and monitor her vitals.

"Anything changes, you get me immediately," he barked.

"Yes sir," the young nurse blinked, his eyes wandering from the bed and back to Kirk and McCoy, who both looked grim.

"Any fluctuation, no matter how small," McCoy insisted.

"He's got it, Bones," Kirk said. "Come on, your office."

They waited until they got to the privacy of the CMO's office before speaking again.

"Computer, privacy lockdown delta seven," Kirk ordered.

"Delta seven initiated," the computer replied. "No microphone or camera monitoring until lockdown rescinded."

McCoy ran a hand through his hair. "Section 31?" he asked.

Kirk leaned forward in his chair. "A very secret part of Starfleet, headed by your personal favourite psychopath and mine, Admiral Marcus. He told me of its existence when he told me to chase Khan down. They're spies, basically. Doing the dirty work so we shiny starship captains don't have to."

"How come Christine thinks that they put some kind of kill-chip in her?" McCoy demanded.

"I have no idea, Bones," Kirk said, shaking his head. "Although if she was working for them..."

"She was not working for them," McCoy said.

"She might have been, Bones," Kirk said gently. "After all, we were, for a while."

There was a pause while McCoy worked through the information.

"She did give Marcus' name," he said eventually. "She wouldn't have said that unless she knew about Section 31."

"You need to go and find out if there is a chip in her," Kirk said seriously. "She could be in danger if there is."

"Jesus Christ," McCoy swore, shaking his head. "This is not how I imagined her coming back to me."

There wasn't much Kirk could say to that, so he diplomatically left McCoy to prepare.

When Christine woke up, McCoy was sitting slumped in a seat next to her bed. He'd clearly been reviewing charts, but had fallen asleep next to her. The biobed chirruped as she woke, which alerted McCoy.

"How do you feel?" he asked, peering into her pupils.

"Fine," she assured him. The back of her neck felt cold, and she raised her hand to find a section of her hair missing.

"You were right," McCoy said, turning behind him to pick up a small specimen jar. "There was a chip. Scotty's taken a look at it, and almost puked. It contains an explosive that would blow your brain clear out of your head."

"I didn't know it was there," Christine said after a moment. "They didn't tell me that."

"I think that there were a lot of things that Admiral Marcus didn't tell us," McCoy said grimly. "You need to be filled in about what's gone on in your absence, and Kirk wants to know about your mission on Lintallia."

"I'll tell him anything he wants to know," Christine said, sitting back against the biobed. "I'm done with them."

"Maybe they won't be done with you," McCoy warned.

Christine could feel the tears start, and McCoy cursed and sat on the bed to bring her into his arms.

"Don't listen to me, I'm an idiot," McCoy said fiercely. "We'll get you out of this, Christine."

"And I've got a plan," announced Kirk, entering the private room.

McCoy made to leave Christine, but Kirk waved his actions away.

"You've been pining ever since she left, Bones, I'm not going to stop you. He's been utterly miserable. Not even your friend Carol could cheer him up."

"Carol's here?" Christine asked, from the protective circle of McCoy's arms.

"She's practically beating down the door out there to get to you. I filled her in on her father's role in all this, and she's horrified."

Christine was silent for a moment, then she raised her head and said, "I'm not ashamed of being recruited to Section 31. They were right. Sometimes you can't be open about everything. If I hadn't been on Lintallia then the Romulans would have taken the Outer Territories by now and innocent people would have been killed."

"She's got a point, Jim," McCoy shrugged. "The only people we lost were the three scientists who took their drug."

"That's what I don't like," Christine said sharply. "The fear and intimidation. They thought that Section 31 would punish them if they were rescued, and that death by poison was better than facing Section 31. Marcus told me it was supposed to protect the Federation, but not at this expense."

"You want out?" Kirk asked.

Christine nodded. "All this has jaded me. I can't trust an organisation that thinks that they have to implant bombs in peoples' skulls. I'm also not a fan of a secret organisation that's had their security breached by at least one double agent."

"Why don't you start at the beginning?" Kirk suggested, and Christine did. She told them of her recruitment, and how it had involved being denied the MD course and taking a nursing course instead. She told them of the secret facility where she'd been tested and now, she realised, implanted with a chip. She told them about how she'd been assigned the Lintallia job, and how she'd gone because that's what her sense of duty had told her to do. She told them about the settlement, the genetic testing, and how she realised, in the end, that Barnaby was the only person she hadn't tested. She hedged over how she had got the sample from him – that was for her and McCoy to talk about later, if they ever had that particular conversation. She explained about the Romulan attack, and how she'd broken her way into the Section 31 research base with the families of the Starfleet personnel.

"I'm sorry that I lied to you, Len," she said quietly. "I wanted to tell you so many times, butI couldn't."

"You did the right thing," he said gruffly. "I don't care much for lying and sneaking about, but if they'd asked me to serve, I probably would have done the same thing you did."

"Really?" she asked.

"You were asked to do a job that nobody else could do," he said simply. "You saw it as a duty, Christine, and you can't turn your back on a duty."

"I don't want to lie to you again," she vowed. "From now on, nothing but the truth."

Once the whole story had been explained to them, Kirk and McCoy told Christine about what she'd missed when she was so far away, about how Admiral Marcus was so intent about defending the Federation from the Klingons, he'd nearly started a war and had used the_ emEnterprise/em_ as bait.

"He was insane," Christine said, eventually. "Poor Carol."

"All this leads me to wonder who's in charge of Section 31 now," McCoy said, his arm still around her.

"I have no idea," Christine said helplessly. "My only contact was Barnaby, and I blew him up."

Kirk shook his head in admiration. "I didn't think you had it in you," he told her.

Christine shrugged. "You'll be amazed what you can do if you have to," she said quietly. "I don't think of myself as a killer, though."

McCoy's arms tightened around her. "When I got back up here, you were bustling around this Sickbay like you owned it," he said. "You were cut and burned and bruised and needed to be off your feet, but you were taking care of the people around you. You care about people Christine. That's what defines you, not what you did down on that planet."

Christine could tell he was sincere. She rested her forehead against his and just breathed him in.

"I missed you," she said quietly. "So very much."

"Are you walking back through the door?" he asked, equally quietly.

"Yes," she said immediately.

He kissed her so firmly and strongly that she was lost in it. She clung to him fiercely, and he held her with the same ferocity.

A gentle cough returned them to normality.

"If you two lovebirds are ready, I've got a plan to get Christine out of Section 31," Kirk said airily. "If you're interested, that it. I mean, I could come back..."

"Jim," McCoy sighed, releasing Christine.

"Okay," Kirk said, leaning forward, "This is it..."

The em_Enterprise/em_ returned to Earth in record time, with the ship's engines working at maximum warp. Christine had received orders to appear in front of a tribunal to explain her role in the saving of the plant from the Romulans, and she, Kirk and the rest of the senior staff of the ship had helped her cobble together a story that left out all mention of spies, genetic modification and secret bases.

Sitting in the room, acting as assistant to one of the admirals chairing the session, was Shav, the Andorian yeoman who had assisted Admiral Marcus. He watched Christine very carefully as she gave her evidence, and remained quietly in the background as the tribunal ended and Christine was promoted to lieutenant in reward for her quick thinking and the protection of the lives of the families of Starfleet personnel.

As soon as the tribunal ended, Christine received a message on her communicator from Shav that an Admiral Simmons would like to see her immediately. She told Shav she'd be there as soon as possible, and flicked the small button on the underneath of her communicator that turned it into a locater beacon for transporters. Commander Scott had managed to convert the normal communicator in record time.

When she reached Admiral Simmons' office, she was unsurprised to see it was the one that Marcus had used all those years ago, and that Shav was sitting behind the yeoman's desk. She was shown in immediately, and she saluted Admiral Simmons, a hard-faced woman with angular features and steel-grey hair.

"At ease, Lieutenant," Simmons said, looking at her approvingly. "Good work on Lintallia."

"Thank you sir," Christine said. "I'm here to resign my position from Section 31."

The Admiral looked amused. "I don't think you understand, Chapel. You just don't quit Section 31. Once you're in, you're in for life."

The noise of transporter beams filled the room, and Christine was suddenly flanked by Kirk on one side of her, McCoy on the other. Commander Spock had materialised behind the Admiral's chair, and a nervous looking Commander Scott appeared to the side of him and immediately took over the computer unit on Simmons' desk.

After a few moments' work, he looked up at Kirk. "You're all set," he said. "All the recordings in the room have been turned off."

"Admiral," Kirk said, nodding to her. "You're going to release Lieutenant Chapel from active service to Section 31 and you're going to assign her to the em_Enterprise/em_."

"And why should I do that?" the Admiral said, cool as a cucumber despite the invasion of her office.

"Starfleet has had a bit of a public relations nosedive recently, hasn't it?" Kirk mused, looking out of the window of the room at the construction work still going on in San Francisco. "An admiral goes rogue, builds the largest and most powerful ship ever constructed – all secretly, of course – and then crashes it into downtown San Francisco. How many civilian lives were lost, in that attack, by the way? Was it as many as London, which Starfleet was also directly responsible for?"

"Your point?" the admiral asked coldly.

"Well, if you think that's bad, how do you think that the Federation Council would react to the public exposure of Section 31?" Kirk asked. "How they regularly implant their spies with kill chips? How civilians that work for them, civilians who had been saved and were in no danger, thought that committing suicide was preferable to being debriefed by Section 31? How this agency managed to completely miss that one of its operatives was a genetically altered Romulan spy and had been leaking information to the Romulans for years?"

The admiral actually winced then. Kirk leaned over the admiral's desk, pressing his point.

"We know all about the kill chip in Christine's head, admiral. We've tried to take it out. We can't. You'd need a surgeon with nerves of steel and the steadiest hands in the galaxy, and we're just not that lucky."

Christine deliberately did not look at McCoy, who was not looking at her.

"So," Kirk continued. "We have a deal for you."

"What kind of deal?" the admiral asked sharply.

"Christine is no longer an active member of Section 31," Kirk said simply. "You strike her from your list, you do not call upon her to serve. As far as you're concerned, she's gone. In exchange, we all stay quiet about Section 31. The officers in front of you are the only ones that know about Section 31 and Christine's role in it."

"The kill chip is the guarantee?" the admiral asked.

Kirk nodded. "If at any time, word of the truth about the Romulans on Lintallia comes out, then you activate the chip. This way, you're guaranteeing our silence."

The admiral looked at Christine, and focused on the patch of shorter hair on the side of her head. "I want proof that the chip is still in place," she said abruptly.

"You can scan her," Kirk said, motioning Christine to come forward.

The admiral pulled a hand-held scanner from the drawer of her desk, and got up to stand in front of Christine. The scanning unit beeped and chirruped when it was held over the shorter patch of hair, and the admiral nodded.

"The chip is still in place," she said, moving to stand by the window, looking out at the construction work below. "I agree to your terms."

"Lieutenant Chapel will be assigned to the _Enterprise_," Kirk stated. "We're on a five-year exploratory mission, which we really need to get back to, Earth having been explored pretty thoroughly by now. That's five years to bury the truth about Lintallia."

The admiral nodded. "Take her back with you," she said. "She's not a part of Section 31 anymore. Dismissed, captain."

With a salute that was more mocking than deferential, Kirk signalled the em_Enterprise/em _for beam-up, and they were out of the system in less than two and a half minutes.

"These are your quarters," McCoy said, walking her down a corridor and stopping outside a room that had her name and rank written neatly in black letters on a plate on the wall.

"I can't believe I'm really here," she said, touching the short patch of hair.

"Scotty's decoy chip was good enough to fool the scanner, just as he promised it would be," McCoy said softly. "I'm just sorry that there has to be anything in there at all."

"No," Christine said thoughtfully. "It's a reminder to me. I rushed into Section 31 without really thinking it through. I was so amazed that they thought I was good enough that I didn't realise the extent of it. This dummy chip," she said, tapping the side of her head, "is a reminder to not be such a dummy next time."

She opened the doors to her quarters and looked inside. "Much nicer than the pre-fab pod on Lintallia," she said approvingly, walking inside. "Much bigger, too."

McCoy had followed her inside, and was trying not to look at the large double bed in the room.

"This doesn't seem to be standard issue," Christine said, running her hand along it.

"It's actually one of the rooms for married personnel," McCoy said. "Jim said it was all that was left."

"Really?" asked Christine, smiling. "That's...convenient."

She unbuttoned her ugly grey dress uniform jacket and tossed it onto a chair.

"I'm still feeling weak from the surgery," she told him. "You'll have to come and help me with the rest."

He was there in an instant.

Later, as they lay in each other's arms, sweaty, tired and completely sated, he asked hesitantly, "Do you want me to go?"

"No," she told him, with a deep breath. "I want you to stay."

"Okay," he said softly, and kissed her so sweetly she could have cried.

She slept, and when she woke up, he was still there. He was snoring, and he'd managed to steal half of her coverings. The pillows were all askew and she was too hot because he'd refused to give her any space, covering her with his body.

It was perfect, and she'd never been happier.


End file.
